
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



Nathaniel Hawthorne 

HOW TO KNOW HIM 

By 

George Edward Woodberry 

iAuthor of 

America in Literature, The Torch 

Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 

etc. , etc. 

With Portrait 



027 



INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright 1918 
The BoBBs-MERRiLt Company 



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PRESS OF 

BRAUNWORTH & CO. 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



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©CI.A5ila6.) 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I Old New England 1 

II Tales of an Elder Day 40 

III Hawthorne's Artistic Method 73' 

IV The Colonial Tradition 96 

V The Great Puritan Romance 136 

VI The New Englander Abroad 179 

VII Conclusion 220 

Index 237 



HAWTHORNE 



HAWTHORNE 



CHAPTER I 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 



WHAT is more characteristic of old New Eng- 
land than a snow-storm ? Whittier's "Snow- 
Bound" is an epitome of the old home life. Emer- 
son's "Snow Storm" — 

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky" — 

although bad meteorology, gives truly the wind- 
sculpture of the day after, out-of-doors, with its 
soft farm-contours on "stake, or tree, or door," 
on "coop or kennel," in the brilliant air. They mix 
an exquisite homeliness with the wintry beauty, both 
true to the soil. Hawthorne, in "Snow-Flakes," a 
slight sketch, describes the approach of the storm, 
as mere weather, with a loving and minute care that 
makes it a real overture to winter. The scene is 
atmospheric, and the air bites. This is old New 
England on a December day : 

"There is snow in yonder cold gray sky of the 
morning! — and, through the partially frosted win- 

1 



2 HAWTHORNE 

dow panes, I love to watch the gradual beginning of 
the storm. A few feathery flakes are scattered 
widely through the air, and hover downward with 
uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, 
now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the 
atmosphere. These are not the big flakes, heavy 
with moisture, which melt as they touch the ground, 
and are portentous of a soaking rain. It is to be, in 
good earnest, a wintry storm. The two or three peo- 
ple visible on the sidewalks have an aspect of endur- 
ance, a blue-nosed, frosty fortitude, which is evi- 
dently assumed in anticipation of a comfortless and 
blustering day. By nightfall, or at least before the 
sun sheds another glimmering smile upon us, the 
street and our little garden will be heaped with 
mountain snow-drifts. The soil, already frozen for 
weeks past, is prepared to sustain whatever burden 
may be laid upon it ; and, to a northern eye, the land- 
scape will lose its melancholy bleakness and acquire 
a beauty of its own, when Mother Earth, like her 
children, shall have put on the fleecy garb of her 
winter's wear. The cloud spirits are slowly weaving 
her white mantle. As yet, indeed, there is barely a 
rime like hoarfrost over the brown surface of the 
street; the withered grass of the grass-plat is still 
discernible; and the slated ropfs of the houses do 
but begin to look gray instead of black. All the snow 
that has yet fallen within the circumference of my 
view, were it heaped up together, would hardly 
equal the hillock of a grave." 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 3 

There is a snow-bound leisure in the very style! 

A more fixed feature of ancestral New England, 
with which Hawthorne, boy and man, was familiar, 
is the fishing village on the coast. He knew the 
region, also, far and wide in the interior, both by 
residence and random bits of travel; but his birth 
and home were by the sea, and he had sea-blood 
from his fathers. His employment, too, in middle 
life, brought him in close contact Avith seafaring 
men. The touch of salt was not uncommon then, in 
New England blood. Longfellow had it ; and how 
happily the sea slips like a tide into his verse ! 

"I remember the black wharves and the slips, 

And the sea-tides tossing free ; 
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 

And the magic of the sea." 

Longfellow looked like a sailor, in cheek, eye and 
build. Hawthorne, in the long tramps he was accus- 
tomed to take by the rocky ledges of the shore and 
upon the broad stretches of shining beach, must 
have felt the call of the blood. All the paraphernalia 
of the sea interested him ; and its human figures held 
his eye, alike by their reality and their picturesque- 
ness. Consider this sketch of the coast village : 

"It was a small collection of dwellings that 
seemed to have been cast up by the sea, with the 
rockweed and marine plants that it vomits after a 



4 HAWTHORNE 

storm, or to have come ashore among the pipe staves 
and other lumber which had been washed from the 
deck of an eastern schooner. There was just space 
for the narrow and sandy street, between the beach 
in front and a precipitous hill that lifted its rocky- 
forehead in the rear, among a waste of juniper 
bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. 
The village was picturesque in the variety of its edi- 
fices, though all were rude. Here stood a little old 
hovel, built perhaps of driftwood; there a row of 
boat-houses ; and beyond them a two-story dwelling, 
of dark and weather-beaten aspect, the whole inter- 
mixed with one or two snug cottages, painted white, 
a sufficiency of pigsties, and a shoemaker's shop. 
Two grocery stores stood opposite each other, in 
the center of the village. These were the places of 
resort, at their idle hours, of a hardy throng of fish- 
ermen, in red baize shirts, oilcloth trousers, and 
boots of brown leather covering the whole leg; true 
seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than 
walk the earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as 
if they did but creep out of salt water to sun them- 
selves; nor would it have been wonderful to see 
their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shell- 
fish, such as cling to rocks and old ship timber over 
which the tide ebbs and fiows." 

And hearken to "Uncle Parker," as he sits "yarn- 
ing" in the village store : 

**His figure is before me now, enthroned upon a 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 5 

mackerel barrel, a lean old man, of great height, but 
bent with years and twisted into an uncouth shape 
by seven broken limbs ; furrowed also, and weather- 
worn, as if every gale, for the better part of a cen- 
tury, had caught him somewhere on the sea. He 
looked like a harbinger of tempest; a shipmate of 
the Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages 
aboard men-of-war and merchant-men, fishing 
schooners and chebacco boats, the old salt had be- 
come master of a handcart, which he daily trundled 
about the vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn 
through the streets of Salem. One of Uncle Par- 
ker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder, and 
the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it 
upward as he spoke, it was his delight to tell of 
cruises against the French, and battles with his own 
shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be 
seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down 
by a spike nail through his trousers, and there to 
fight it out. Sometimes he expatiated on the deli- 
cious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and goose-like 
fowl, which the sailors catch with hook and line on 
the Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an in- 
terminable winter at the Isle of Sables, where he had 
gladdened himself, amid polar snows, with the rum 
and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India 
schooner. And wrathfully did he shake his fist, as 
he related how a party of Cape Cod men had robbed 
him and his companions of their lawful spoil, and 
sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving 
him not a drop to drovv^n his sorrow. Villains they 



6 HAWTHORNE 

were, and of that wicked brotherhood who are said 
to tie lanterns to horses' tails, to mislead the mariner 
along the dangerous shores of the Cape.'* 

When it comes the imaginary narrator's turn to 
take the old "uncle's" place, he tells of the marvelous 
sailors of a former age: "If the young men boast 
their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I 
speak of pilots v/ho knew the wind by its scent and 
the wave by its taste, and could have steered bHnd- 
fold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert, 
guided only by the rote of the shore, — the peculiar 
sound of the surf on each island, beach, and line 
of rocks along the coast." This is the same pen 
that, at a riper period of life and experience, wrote 
reminiscences of ships' cabins at Boston and sea- 
captains' talk at Liverpool, and drew those too- 
faithful and yet-un forgotten portraits of the worth- 
ies of the Salem Custom House. 

Hawthorne delighted in these local pen-drawings. 
He was a born observer; and this faculty of minute 
observation, with the attendant power to reproduce 
the scene in words, was perhaps the first literary dis- 
covery he made in the matter of his talent. He was 
an inveterate journalizer. "Keeping a diary" was 
a habit of old New England, and, though Haw- 
thorne called the thing a "note-book," he must have 
produced endless reams of such writing. This daily 
exercise — it seems to have been practically that- 
sharpened and fixed his habit of observation; and, 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 7 

perhaps, it encouraged an indiscriminate attention to 
small matters. What he jotted in one of these note- 
books was apt to turn up afterward in a sketch or 
tale. It was out of such observation and annotation 
that his early local sketches grew — scenes of the 
Salem streets, landscapes from a steeple, figures in a 
railway station, a day in a toll-house on the bridge, 
and the like. The look of old New England might 
be almost reconstructed out of these and similar 
passages in Hawthorne's work. 

But it was not only the local aspect of his imme- 
diate vicinity that Hawthorne saw and recorded. 
Old New England was not merely a winter scene or 
a fishing village, nor even a whole county; it em- 
braced a mode of life scattered over a wide district. 
Hawthorne had summered and wintered it in many 
parts besides Salem, his birthplace, and its surround- 
ing country. He spent his boyhood at Sebago Lake, 
in Maine, in a region almost primitive; his college 
days were passed at Bowdoin; and, later, he knew 
some sort of vacation travels that took him to New 
Hampshire, Connecticut and Western Massachu- 
setts, and apparently as far as Niagara. There are 
even whispers of Detroit, as a far-western terminal 
to his wayfaring. Those were the days of the stage- 
coach, with its abundant opportunity to see the 
world on a journey, and not merely to speed through 
it. There was a vagabond streak in Hawthorne at 
that age, a desire to wander, natural to his years. It 
seems to have been rather a slow fever, it is true ; it 



8 HAWTHORNE 

did not take him far, except in his mind, perhaps; 
but it made him very sympathetic with the things of 
"the road." The nucleus of the story-telhng faculty, 
from Chaucer's day, has often been a pilgrimage. 
Among Hawthorne's early plans in literature, that 
never worked out, was one to weave a chain of such 
vagabond tales by an itinerant story-teller and his 
companion. Such literary schemes in his mind de- 
rived both their material and their method from his 
little journeys in rural communities, where the free- 
masonry of the stage-coach and the tavern prevailed. 
The scenes and the characters of these excursions 
into the provincial world of New England, are often 
set forth in their raw state in his contemporary 
note-book, minutely and at length. These are very 
informal writings, with little intention in them, best 
described by their editor as "the results of an early 
formed taste for exercising his pen upon the sim- 
plest objects of notice that surrounded him." For 
this very reason they are almost a photographic ren- 
dering of New England. 

The note-books, indeed, are so continuous and 
abundant that they constitute, taken together, a mo- 
tion-picture, so to speak, of Hawthorne's environ- 
ment from youth to age. The scene is more 
crowded with humanity, when he is abroad in the 
world ; when he comes home again, nature comes to 
the foreground. The diary of his Concord days, 
after his marriage, illustrates this. It is a history of 



OLD NEW ENGLAND S 

his farm. Its main interest may be said to be vege- 
tables. This is his garden : 



"The natural taste of man for the original Adam's 
occupation is fast developing itself in me. I find that 
I am a good deal interested in our garden, although, 
as it was planted before we came here, I do not feel 
the same affection for the plants that I should if the 
seed had been sown by my own hands. It is some- 
thing like nursing and educating another person's 
children. Still, it was a very pleasant moment when 
I gathered the first string-beans, which were the 
earliest esculent that the garden contributed to our 
table. And I love to watch the successive develop- 
ment of each new vegetable, and mark its daily 
growth, which always affects me with surprise. It 
is as if something were being created under my own 
inspection, and partly by my own aid. One day, per- 
chance, I look at my bean-vines, and see only the 
green leaves clambering up the poles; again, to- 
morrow, I give a second glance, and there are the 
delicate blossoms; and a third day, on a somewhat 
closer observation, I discover the tender young beans, 
hiding among the foliage. Then, each morning, I 
watch the swelling of the pods and calculate how 
soon they will be ready to yield their treasures. All 
this gives a pleasure and an ideality, hitherto un- 
thought of, to the business of providing sustenance 
for my family. I suppose Adam felt it in Paradise ; 



10 HAWTHORNE 

and, of merely and exclusively earthly enjoyments, 
there are few purer and more harmless to be experi- 
enced. Speaking of beans, by the way, they are a 
classical food, and their culture must have been the 
occupation of many ancient sages and heroes. Sum- 
mer-squashes are a very pleasant vegetable to be 
acquainted with. They grow in the forms of urns 
and vases, — some shallow, others deeper, and all 
with a beautifully scalloped edge. Almost any 
squash in our garden might be copied by a sculptor, 
and would look lovely in marble, or in china; and, 
if I could afford it, I would have exact imitations 
of the real vegetable as portions of my dining-serv- 
ice. They would be very appropriate dishes for 
holding garden-vegetables. Besides the summer- 
squashes, we have the crook-necked winter-squash, 
which I always delight to look at, when it turns up 
its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except 
a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that im- 
parts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the 
beholder. Our own crop, however, does not prom- 
ise to be very abundant ; for the leaves formed such 
a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that 
most of them dropped off without producing the 
germ of fruit. Yesterday and to-day I have cut 
oft* an immense number of leaves, and have thus 
given the remaining blossoms a chance to profit by 
the air and sunshine; but the season is too far ad- 
vanced, I am afraid, for the squashes to attain any 
great bulk, and grow yellow in the sun. We have 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 11 

muskmelons and watermelons, which promise to 
supply us with as many as we can eat. After all, 
the greatest interest of these vegetables does not 
seem to consist in their being articles of food. It 
is rather that we love to see something born into 
the world ; and w^hen a great squash or melon is pro- 
duced, it is a large and tangible existence, which the 
imagination can seize hold of and rejoice in. I love, 
also, to see my own works contributing to the life 
and well-being of animate nature. It is pleasant to 
have the bees come and suck honey out of my 
squash-blossoms, though, when they have laden 
themselves, they fly away to some unknown hive, 
which will give me back nothing in return for what 
my garden has given them. But there is much more 
honey in the world, and so I am content. Indian 
corn, in the prime and glory of its verdure, is a very 
beautiful vegetable, both considered in the separate 
plant, and in a mass in a broad field, rustling and 
waving, and surging up and down in the breeze and 
sunshine of a summer afternoon. We have as many 
as fifty hills, I should think, which will give us an 
abundant supply. Pray Heaven that we may be able 
to eat it all ! for it is not pleasant to think that any- 
thing which Nature has been at the pains to produce 
should be thrown away. But the hens will be glad 
of our superfluity, and so will the pigs, though we 
have neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we 
must certainly keep. There Is something very so- 
ciable and quiet, and soothing, too, in their solilo- 



12 HAWTHORNE 

quies and converse among themselves; and, in an 
idle and half -meditative mood, it is very pleasant to 
watch a party of hens picking up their daily sub- 
sistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of 
them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a 
picture with delight. 

"I find that I have not given a very complete idea 
of our garden, although it certainly deserves an 
ample record in this chronicle, since my labors in 
it are the only present labors of my life. Besides 
what I have mentioned, we have cucumber-vines, 
which to-day yielded us the first cucumber of the 
season, a bed of beets, and another of carrots, and 
another of parsnips and turnips, none of which 
promise a very abundant harvest. In truth, the soil 
is worn out, and, moreover, received very little 
manure this season. Also, we have cabbages in 
superfluous abundance, inasmuch as we neither of 
us have the least affection for them; and it would 
be unreasonable to expect Sarah, the cook, to eat 
fifty head of cabbages. Tomatoes, too, we shall have 
by and by. At our first arrival, we found green 
peas ready for gathering, and these, instead of the 
string-beans, were the first offering of the garden 
to our board.'* 

The mild vein of meditation slipping in between 
the squashes and the corn, in this extract, indicates 
that "sunthin' in the pastoral line," long native to 
the New England literary temperament, though it 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 13 

seldom crops out m recent years. Thoreau was its 
most distinguished prose prophet; but it covered all 
our pastures with a mist of sentiment. The mood 
clung about persons as well as products. There is 
an adjoining passage, in the diary, about Emerson 
and Margaret Fuller in the summer woods of Con- 
cord, near the Old Manse farm described above, 
which is a true Yankee idyl. Hawthorne is espe- 
cially happy in his descriptions of the forest land- 
scape and country atmosphere of his early Concord 
days. It was, indeed, an enchanted region ; the eyes 
that looked on it had been touched by fairy herbs. 
Thoreau confounded Concord River with the Nile, 
and spoke slightingly of travel except in the Maine 
woods or on Cape Cod. Emerson, it must be owned, 
was a fellow conspirator with him in this advocacy 
of the parish. 

It requires large minds and immense vistas to do 
away with perspectives and proportion, in this high 
Concord way. It is to forego the telescope for the 
microscope, as if minuteness of observation could 
compensate for the world's horizons. A certain 
pettiness creeps inevitably upon the daily page that 
records the habitual and the commonplace, no mat- 
ter how truthfully. "Yesterday I found two mush- 
rooms in the woods, probably of the preceding 
night's growth. Also I saw a mosquito, frost- 
pinched, and so wretched that I felt avenged for all 
the injuries which his tribe inflicted ujx^n me last 
summer, and so did not molest this lone survivor. 



14 HAWTHORNE 

... I found a maple-leaf to-day, yellow all over, 
except its extremest point, which was bright scarlet. 
It looked as if a drop of blood were hanging from 
it." Hawthornesque remarks, truly. These things 
belong to the fecundity of universal nature, and the 
infinitesimal has a large share in that. Yet, even in 
trifles, Hawthorne never loses for long his vivid 
literary touch. "A gust of violets along a wood- 
path," — that is the whole note; simple, elemental, 
like an eastern drawing. But such simplicity, ap- 
plied to a whole summer and a countryside, requires 
the tolerance of a strolling mind. His own spirit 
was of a leisurely make. Small things easily ab- 
sorbed his attention; they illustrate the nicety of 
his senses, and, often, the wings of his imagination; 
but, though it may seem a paradox to say so, this 
habit of small thinking points to an indolence in 
his mentality, as if it grew comatose in such leth- 
argic surroundings as he found himself in from time 
to time. 

But when he lifts his eyes from insect life, the 
pigsty and the kitchen-garden, how the winding 
Concord River comes into view, the grape-vine 
thickets by Brook Farm, Cow Island with its stately 
pines — "Somewhat like looking among the pillars 
of a church;" or, to quote once more his infinite 
panorama of the countryside, the "American au- 
tumn" emerges, drenched in sunlight, a tranquil 
scene worthy of his own romances! 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 15 

"I returned home by the high-road. On my right, 
separated from the road by a level field, perhaps 
fifty yards across, was a range of young forest- 
trees, dressed in their garb of autumnal glory. The 
sun shone directly upon them; and sunlight is like 
the breath of life to the pomp of autumn. In its 
absence, one doubts whether there be any truth in 
what poets have told about the splendor of an 
American autumn; but when this charm is added, 
one feels that the effect is beyond description. As I 
beheld it to-day, there was nothing dazzling; it 
was gentle and mild, though brilliant and diversi- 
fied, and had a most quiet and pensive influence. 
And yet there were some trees that seemed really 
made of sunshine, and others were of a sunny red, 
and the whole picture was painted with but little 
relief of darksome hues, — only a few evergreens. 
But there was nothing inharmonious ; and, on closer 
examination, it appeared that all the tints had a re- 
lationship among themselves. And this, I suppose, 
is the reason that, while nature seems to scatter them 
so carelessly, they still never shock the beholder by 
their contrasts, nor disturb, but only soothe. The 
brilliant scarlet and the brilliant yellow are different 
hues of the maple-leaves, and the first changes into 
the last. I saw one maple-tree, its center yellow as 
gold, set in a framework of red. The native poplars 
have different shades of green, verging towards 
yellow, and are very cheerful in the sunshine. Most 



16 HAWTHORNE 

of the oak-leaves have still the deep verdure of sum- 
mer; but where a change has taken place, it is into 
a russet-red, warm, but sober. These colors, in- 
finitely varied by the progress which different trees 
have made in their decay, constitute almost the 
whole glory of autumnal woods; but it is impossible 
to conceive how much is done with such scanty ma- 
terials." 

This is like a glass of Donatello's golden wine at 
Monte Beni. 

As characteristic a scene of Hawthorne's old New 
England is this sketch in the heart of the city, at no 
less locally famous a rendezvous than the *'Frog 
Pond" on Boston Common : 

''One of my chief amusements is to see the boys 
sail their miniature vessels on the Frog Pond. 
There is a great variety of shipping owned among 
the young people, and they appear to have a con- 
siderable knowledge of the art of managing vessels. 
There is a full-rigged man-of-war, with, I believe, 
every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its 
appearance ; and, when on a voyage across the pond, 
it so identically resembles a great ship, except in 
size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its mo- 
tions, — its tossing up and down on the small waves, 
and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling 
to the breeze, — the whole effect, in short, is that of 
a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is some- 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 17 

thing that kindles the imagination more than the 
reality would do. If we see a real, great ship, the 
mind grasps and possesses, within its real clutch, 
all that there is of it; while here the mimic ship is 
the representation of an ideal one, and so gives us a 
more imaginative pleasure." 

The lesson as to the imagination is significant, 
and illustrates the nearness of Hawthorne's medita- 
tion or fancy or sentiment to any object his eye 
noted; reflection seems instantaneous with observa- 
tion, and almost to coincide with it. Neither eye nor 
mind was less hospitable, it seems, to one thing than 
another. 

But to bring to an end these extracts from many 
times and seasons and varieties of place, which show 
different aspects of Hawthorne's native world and 
the kind of interest he took in it, observe the vivid 
detail, both material and human, of this Dutch pic- 
ture, as it were, of the old original Boston hostelry, 
renowned as 'Tarker's" : 

"I did not go out yesterday afternoon, but after 
tea I went to Parker's. The drinking and smoking 
shop is no bad place to see one kind of life. The 
front apartment is for drinking. The door opens 
into Court Square, and is denoted, usually, by some 
choice specimens of dainties exhibited in the win- 
dows, or hanging beside the door-post; as, for in- 
stance, a pair of canvas-back ducks, distinguishable 



18 HAWTHORNE 

by their delicately mottled feathers; an admirable 
cut of raw beefsteak; a ham, ready boiled, and with 
curious figures traced in spices on its outward fat; 
a half, or perchance the whole, of a large salmon, 
when in season; a bunch of partridges, etc., etc. A 
screen stands directly before the door, so as to con- 
ceal the interior from an outside barbarian. At the 
counter stand, at almost all hours, — certainly at all 
hours when I have chanced to observe, — tipplers, 
either taking a solitary glass, or treating all round, 
veteran topers, flashy young men, visitors from the 
country, the various petty officers connected with 
the law, whom the vicinity of the Court-House 
brings hither. Chiefly, they drink plain liquors, gin, 
brandy, or whiskey, sometimes a Tom and Jerry, a 
gin cocktail (which the bar-tender makes artistic- 
ally, tossing it in a large parabola from one tumbler 
to another, until fit for drinking), a brandy-smash, 
and numerous other concoctions. All this toping 
goes forward with little or no apparent exhilaration 
of spirits; nor does this seem to be the object 
sought, — it being rather, I imagine, to create a tit- 
illation of the coats of the stomach and a general 
sense of invigoration, without affecting the brain. 
Very seldom does a man grow wild and unruly. 

"The inner room is hung round with pictures and 
engravings of various kinds, — a painting of a pre- 
mium ox, a lithograph of a Turk and of a Turkish 
lady, . . . and various showily engraved tailors' 
advertisements, and other shop-bills; among them 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 19 

all, a small painting of a drunken toper, sleeping on 
a bench beside the grog-shop, — a ragged, half -hat- 
less, bloated, red-nosed, jolly, miserable-looking 
devil, very well done, and strangely suitable to the 
room in which it hangs. Round the walls are placed 
some half a dozen marble-topped tables, and a cen- 
ter-table in the midst; most of them strewn with 
theatrical and other show-bills; and the large the- 
ater-bills, with their type of gigantic solidity and 
blackness, hung against the walls. . . . 

"Pacing the sidewalk in front of this grog-shop 
of Parker's (or sometimes, on cold and rainy days, 
taking his station inside), there is generally to be ob- 
served an elderly ragamufhn, in a dingy and bat- 
tered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby 
general aspect; a thin face and red nose, a patch 
over one eye, and the other half drowned in mois- 
ture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a 
stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody, but 
fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain in- 
tentness. He is a man who has been in decent cir- 
cumstances at some former period of his life, but, 
falling into decay (perhaps by dint of too frequent 
visits at Parker's bar), he now haunts about the 
place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was mur- 
dered, 'to collect his rents,' as Parker says, — that is, 
to catch an occasional nine-pence from some char- 
itable acquaintances, or a glass of liquor at the bar. 
The word 'ragamuffin,' which I have used above, 
does not accurately express the man, because there 



20 HAWTHORNE 

is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability 
about him, and a sobriety too, and a kind of decency 
in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." 

In this fresh print from life one recognizes at a 
glance ''old Moodie," of TJie Blithcdale Romance, 
on his native or adopted heath, the "saloon," where 
he was wont to *'lurk." The absence of Moodie, at 
the moment when, in the romance, the author enters 
on the scene in search of him, gives an opportunity 
for a minute description of the saloon, which is an 
interesting example of how Hawthorne reworked 
his note-books in more elaborate composition for the 
press. That autumn foliage, just spread upon the 
page, is a vista from Blithedale, and could not have 
been far from "Eliot's pulpit," which is one of the 
high lights of the rural landscape in the story. In 
fact, the whole Blithcdale Romance is embedded 
in contemporaneity to a degree not paralleled in any 
other of Hawthorne's w^orks, and reproduces scenes 
from the life of the community in which he lived, 
that startle the memory by their vivid truth. Their 
veracity is that of a crude realism. 

Blithedale is set in the midst of wood and pas- 
ture, and in the breath of agricultural toil. Its story 
enfolds episodes of quiet beauty and many senti- 
mental delights; but, as to the life depicted, one 
closes the pages with a prevailing sense of the trivial 
and the meager, the anaemic, the dingy and the dull 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 21 

It is intellectually mediocre, and at loose ends ; and, 
to a degree unusual even in Hawthorne's art, it 
grows by agglomeration of scene and incident more 
than by inward development. It shares one great 
advantage of historical fiction, although it is not 
history, in that it is based on actual events and 
social characteristics that had a high interest at 
the time, and still retain a legendary charm of 
faded romance; and the opportunity it affords for 
presenting old New England life, though greatly 
narrowed by its reform atmosphere, makes it a true 
chronicle of the time, of permanent local value. It 
enshrines, as is well known, the economic and spir- 
itual episode of Brook Farm, but rather as a ro- 
mantic incident in the community than as a material 
fact. Brook Farm, however, is only the fountain 
and origin of the story, which wanders off into 
quiet dreary suburban places and sinks in mean 
surroundings. 

The two poles of interest in the story are scenes 
from nature on the one hand, and, on the other, 
four romantic characters, obscurely made out as re- 
gards their relations to one another, Hollingsworth, 
Zenobia, Priscilla and Westervelt, who move in the 
contemporary New England environment in town 
and country; an environment specialized, however, 
by the socialistic reform atmosphere of those days, 
as it was illustrated at Brook Farm, and also by 
the "magnetic" or "mesmeric" interests of the hour. 



22 HAWTHORNE 

The place of nature in the romance is symbolized by 
''Eliot's pulpit," a rock in the forest, like a score of 
others in the country woods : 

"The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a 
shattered granite bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with 
an irregular outline and many fissures, out of which 
sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the 
scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their 
roots than any other earth. At the base of the pulpit, 
the broken bowlders inclined towards each other, so 
as to form a shallow cave, within which our little 
party had sometimes found protection from a sum- 
mer shower. On the threshold, or just across it, 
grew a tuft of pale columbines, in their season, and 
yiolets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla 
v/as when we first knew her; children of the sun, 
who had never seen their father, but dwelt among 
damp mosses, though not akin to them. At the sum- 
mit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a 
birch-tree which served as a sounding-board for 
the pulpit. Beneath this shade (with my eyes of 
sense half shut, and those of the imagination widely 
opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indi- 
ans, with the sunlight flickering down upon him 
through the leaves, and glorifying his figure as with 
the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration. 

"I the more minutely describe the rock, and this 
little Sabbath solitude, because Hollingsworth, at 
our solicitation, often ascended Eliot's pulpit, and 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 23 

not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few disci- 
ples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the 
wind's breath among the leaves of the birch-tree. 
No other speech of man has ever moved me like 
some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful — 
a positive calamity to the world — that a treasury 
of golden thoughts should thus be scattered, by the 
liberal handful, down among us three, when a thou- 
sand hearers might have been the richer for them; 
and Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sym- 
pathy of multitudes. After speaking much or lit- 
tle, as might happen, he would descend from his 
gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full 
length on the ground, face downward. Meanwhile, 
we talked around him on such topics as were sug- 
gested by the discourse." 

The conclusion of the colloquies at the base of 
"Eliot's pulpit" was staged by the novelist at the 
village hall, or "lyceum hall," as it was often then 
called, an institution of those days, that ranked 
with the "chapel" of an earlier, or the "forum" of 
a later, time. 

"The scene was one of those lyceum-halls, of 
which almost every village has now its own, dedi- 
cated to that sober and pallid, or rather drab- 
colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the 
lecture. Of late years, this has come strangely into 
vogue, when the natural tendency of things would 



24 HAWTHORNE 

seem to be to substitute lettered for oral methods 
of addressing the public. But, in halls like this, 
besides the winter course of lectures, there is a rich 
and varied series of other exhibitions. Hither comes 
the ventriloquist, with all his mysterious tongues; 
the thaumaturgist, too, with his miraculous trans- 
formations of plates, doves, and rings, his pancakes 
smoking in your hat, and his cellar of choice liquors 
represented in one small bottle. Here, also, the 
itinerant professor instructs separate classes of la- 
dies and gentlemen in physiology, and demonstrates 
his lessons by the aid of real skeletons, and manikins 
in wax, from Paris. Here is to be heard the choir 
of Ethiopian melodists, and to be seen the diorama 
of Moscow or Bunker Hill, or the moving pano- 
rama of the Chinese wall. Here is displayed the 
museum of wax figures, illustrating the wide Catholi- 
cism of earthly renown, by mixing up heroes and 
statesmen, the pope and the Mormon prophet, kings, 
queens, murderers, and beautiful ladies; every sort 
of person, in short, except authors, of whom I never 
beheld even the most famous done in wax. And 
here, in this many-purposed hall (unless the select- 
men of the village chance to have more than their 
share of the Puritanism, which, however diversi- 
fied with later patchwork, still gives its prevailing 
tint to New England character), here the company 
of strolling players sets up its little stage, and 
claims patronage for the legitimate drama. 

"But, on the autumnal evening which I speak of, 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 25 

a number of printed handbills — stuck up in the bar- 
room, and on the sign-post of the hotel, and on the 
meeting-house porch, and distributed largely through 
the village — had promised the inhabitants an inter- 
view with that celebrated and hitherto inexplicable 
phenomenon, the Veiled Lady! 

*'The hall was fitted up with an amphitheatrical de- 
scent of seats towards a platform, on which stood a 
desk, two lights, a stool, and a capacious antique 
chair. The audience was of a generally decent and 
respectable character : old farmers, in their Sunday 
black coats, with shrewd, hard, sun-dried faces, and 
a cynical humor, oftener than any other expression, 
in their eyes; pretty girls, in many-colored attire; 
pretty young men, — the schoolmaster, the lawyer, 
or student at law, the shop-keeper, — all looking 
rather suburban than rural. In these days, there is 
absolutely no rusticity, except when the actual labor 
of the soil leaves its earth-mould on the person. 
There was likewise a considerable proportion of 
young and middle-aged women, many of them stern 
in feature, with marked foreheads, and a very defi- 
nite line of eyebrow ; a type of womanhood in which 
a bold intellectual development seems to be keeping 
pace with the progressive delicacy of the physical 
constitution. Of all these people I took note, at 
first, according to my custom. But I ceased to do 
so the moment that my eyes fell on an individual 
who sat two or three seats below me, immovable, 
apparently deep in thought, with his back, of course, 



26 HAWTHORNE 

towards me, and his face turned steadfastly upon 
the platform. 

"After sitting awhile in contemplation of this per- 
son's familiar contour, I was irresistibly moved to 
step over the intervening benches, lay my hand on 
his shoulder, put my mouth close to his ear, and 
address him in a sepulchral, melodramatic whis- 
per: — 

" 'Hollingsworth ! where have you left Zeno- 
bia?' . . . 

"The audience now began to be impatient; they 
signified their desire for the entertainment to com- 
mence by thump of sticks and stamp of boot-heels. 
Nor was it a great while longer before, in response 
to their call, there appeared a bearded personage in 
Oriental robes, looking like one of the enchanters 
of the Arabian Nights. He came upon the platform 
from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a 
salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and 
first blowing his nose with a white handkerchief, 
prepared to speak. The environment of the homely 
village hall, and the absence of many ingenious 
contrivances of stage-effect with which the exhibi- 
tion had heretofore been set off, seemed to bring 
the artifice of this character more openly upon the 
surface. No sooner did I behold the bearded en- 
chanter, than, laying my hand again on HoUings- 
worth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear,- — 

" *Do you know him?' 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 27 

" *I never saw the man before,' he muttered, 
without turning his head. 

"But I had seen him three times already. Once, 
on occasion of my first visit to the Veiled Lady; a 
second time, in the wood-path at Blithedale; and 
lastly, in Zenobia's drawing-room. It was Wester- 
velt. A quick association of ideas made me shudder 
from head to foot; and again, like an evil spirit, 
bringing up reminiscences of a man's sins, I whis- 
pered a question in Hollingsworth's ear, — 

" *What have you done with Priscilla?' 

"He gave a convulsive start, as if I had thrust a 
knife into him, writhed himself round on his seat, 
glared fiercely into my eyes, but answered not a 
word. 

"The Professor began his discourse, explanatory 
of the psychological phenomena, as he termed them, 
which it was his purpose to exhibit to the spectators. 
There remains no very distinct impression of it on 
my memory. It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, 
with a delusive show of spirituality, yet really im- 
bued throughout with a cold and dead materialism. 
I shivered, as at a current of chill air issuing out of 
a sepulchral vault, and bringing the smell of cor- 
ruption along with it. He spoke of a new era that 
was dawning upon the world; an era that would 
link soul to soul, and the present life to what we 
call futurity, with a closeness that should finally 
convert both worlds into one great, mutually con- 



28 HAWTHORNE 

scious brotherhood. He described (in a strange, 
philosophical guise, with terms of art, as if it were 
a matter of chemical discovery) the agency by 
which this mighty result was to be effected; nor 
would it have surprised me, had he pretended to 
hold up a portion of his universally pervasive fluid, 
as he affirmed it to be, in a glass phial. 

"At the close of his exordium, the Professor 
beckoned with his hand, — once, twice, thrice, — and a 
figure came gliding upon the platform, enveloped in 
a long veil of silvery whiteness. It fell about her 
like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of 
vagueness, so that the outline of the form beneath 
it could not be accurately discerned. But the move- 
ment of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and 
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to 
be the spectacle of thousands; or, possibly, a blind- 
fold prisoner within the sphere with which this 
dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was 
wholly unconscious of being the central object to 
all those straining eyes. 

"Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obse- 
quious courtesy, but at the same time a remarkable 
decisiveness), the figure placed itself in the great 
chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it 
was, perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a 
disembodied spirit as anything that stage trickery 
could devise. The hushed breathing of the spec- 
tators proved how high-wrought were their antici- 
pations of the wonders to be performed through 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 29 

the medium of this incomprehensible creature. I, 
too, was in breathless suspense, but with a far dif- 
ferent presentiment of some strange event at hand. 

" 'You see before you the Veiled Lady/ said the 
bearded Professor, advancing to the verge of the 
platform. 'By the agency of which I have just 
spoken, she is at this moment in communion with 
the spiritual world. That silvery veil is, in one 
sense, an enchantment, having been dipped, as it 
were, and essentially imbued, through the potency 
of my art, with the fluid medium of spirits. Slight 
and ethereal as it seems, the limitations of time and 
space have no existence within its folds. This hall 
— these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within 
so narrow an amphitheatre — are of thinner sub- 
stance, in her view, than the airiest vapor that the 
clouds are made of. She beholds the Absolute!' 

"As preliminary to other and far more wonderful 
psychological experiments, the exhibitor suggested 
that some of his auditors should endeavor to make 
the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such 
methods — provided only no touch were laid upon 
her person — as they might deem best adapted to 
that end. Accordingly, several deep-lunged country- 
fellows, who looked as if they might have blown 
the apparition away with a breath, ascended the 
platform. Mutually encouraging one another, they 
shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like 
a wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the 
floor with bludgeons; they perpetrated so hideous 



30 HAWTHORNE 

a clamor, that methought it might have reached, at 
least, a little way into the eternal sphere. Finally, 
with the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of 
the great chair, and were startled, apparently, to 
find it soar upward, as if lighter than the air through 
which it rose. But the Veiled Lady remained 
seated and motionless, with a composure that was 
hardly less than awful, because implying so im- 
measurable a distance betwixt her and these rude 
persecutors. 

" These efforts are wholly without avail,' ob- 
served the Professor, who had been looking on with 
an aspect of serene indifference. 'The roar of a bat- 
tery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled 
Lady. And yet, were I to will it, sitting in this very 
hall, she could hear the desert wind sweeping over 
the sands as far off as Arabia ; the icebergs grinding 
one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle 
of a leaf in an East-Indian forest; the lowest whis- 
pered breath of the bash fullest maiden in the world, 
uttering the first confession of her love. Nor does 
there exist the moral inducement, apart from my 
own behest, that could persuade her to lift the sil- 
very veil, or arise out of that chair.' 

"Greatly to the Professors discomposure, how- 
ever, just as he spoke these words, the Veiled Lady 
arose. There was a mysterious tremor that shook 
the magic veil. The spectators, it may be, imagined 
that she was about to take flight into that invisible 
sphere, and to the society of those purely spiritual 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 31 

beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin. 
HoUingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the 
platform, and now stood gazing at the figure, with a 
sad intentness that brought the whole power of his 
great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance. 

" *Come,' said he, waving his hand towards her. 
'You are safe T 

"She threw off the veil, and stood before that 
multitude of people pale, tremulous, shrinking, as if 
only then had she discovered that a thousand eyes 
were gazing at her. Poor maiden! How strangely 
had she been betrayed ! Blazoned abroad as a won- 
der of the world, and performing what were ad- 
judged as miracles, — in the faith of many, a seeress 
and a prophetess; in the harsher judgment of others, 
a mountebank, — she had kept, as I religiously be- 
lieve, her virgin reserve and sanctity of soul through- 
out it all. Within that encircling veil, though an 
evil hand had flung it over her, there was as deep 
a seclusion as if this forsaken girl had, all the while, 
been sitting under the shadow of Eliot's pulpit, in 
the Blithedale woods, at the feet of him who now 
summoned her to the shelter of his arms. And the 
true heart-throb of a woman's affection was too 
powerful for the jugglery that had hitherto en- 
vironed her. She uttered a shriek, and fled to Hol- 
lingsworth, like one escaping from her deadhest 
enemy, and was safe forever." 

These various extracts illustrate the nature of the 



32 HAWTHORNE 

environment amid which Hawthorne was placed in 
his day and generation, and the raw material, both 
physical and social, upon which his genius began to 
work. It does not seem, at first sight, to be a rich 
soil for genius. It was a provincial life, set in natu- 
ral magic, but, humanly, rather sad-colored, not to 
say drab. That is the impression that ^'Blithedale'' 
gives; and "Blithedale" is all Hawthorne's genius 
could make of the contemporary scene of New Eng- 
land in its heyday of ''reform." To a certain degree 
the reform element in the tale denaturalized New 
England. The vegetable garden at Concord and 
the fishing village are truer to type, as are the vign- 
ettes, soon to be noticed, of the church steeple, the 
toll-bridge, and the town pump. After all, the town 
pump is the characteristic topic of Hawthorne's 
early manner. It rightly occupied, for a season, the 
center of his stage. That was during the time of 
his hermit-like seclusion in his chamber at Salem, 
waiting for his hour to come and knock at his door. 
Provincial as was his environment in those early 
years of manhood, after he left college, his share 
in it was of the slightest. He had no contacts, ap- 
parently, with life, in the ordinary sense, except 
through sight. He had little, if any, touch of it. 
Perhaps this peculiar situation — this social isolation 
in a small community — sharpened his habits of ob- 
servation; it certainly emphasized his brooding pro- 
pensities ; and it, doubtless, deepened the dark veins 
in his genius. 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 33 

It would, however, be taking far too narrow a 
view to seek the impress of New England on Haw- 
thorne's genius merely in his description of the 
aspect of the soil, or in scenes from contemporary 
life, as he transferred them direct to his note-books, 
or in modified forms to his fiction. He drew more 
deeply from the springs of his birthplace, and his 
nature was more catholic in its response to life, more 
comprehensive of the various influences about him, 
with a greater diversity of gifts, than has been indi- 
cated. He was distinguished from the New Eng- 
land group in general by being more of the common 
human nature, not so specialized in culture or lim- 
ited in taste and talent as was the fortune of one or 
another of them. Not so literary — not such a belle- 
lettrist — as Longfellow, nor so clergy-minded as 
Emerson — not so countrified as Thoreau, nor so 
homespun as Whittier, he was a more complete New 
Englander than any of them, more fully and vari- 
ously representative of the soil and the people. It 
has required time to make this apparent; but as the 
whole period removes gradually, the very excess, 
as it sometimes seems, of contemporaneity in Haw- 
thorne stamps him as the outstanding scribe of his 
age in its **form and feature" as it lived; and not 
merely realistically for the span of one generation or 
two, but he cast the spirit and the look of old New 
England in literature, as one might cast it in bronze, 
for its whole course — our forefathers and their 
land, from the little log-house church in the forest 



34 HAWTHORNE 

clearing to India wharf with its fleets, "wafted on 
some of their many courses by every breeze that 
blows." 

Prolific in books as the later age is, there has 
been no better description of the New England land, 
— hill, field and forest, — than Hawthorne wrote 
down, none so sharply bitten in and at the same time 
comprehensive in its sweep, so true to atmosphere 
and faithful to the rich, native color under a bril- 
liant sky; and to the land he added the rocky mar- 
gin of his own coast, the inshore sea with its myriad 
life, and the solitude that spread its larger silence 
over the non-human world. Similarly, to the quiet 
but thriving activity of his own day he added the 
backward reach of history, — the colony; he made 
himself familiar with the books of his folk, the 
landmarks of their coming hither and their stay, 
the superstition that afi^righted them in the wilder- 
ness, the freedom that sprang up on the new soil, 
more sound and wholesome than grain, the spirit 
of adventure that sent their ships through the w^orld ; 
and his genius, being thus instinct with the whole 
life of his people, delighted in the tale it told. II 
the story was crossed with black humors, they were 
native ones; if it showed meagerness of matter and 
deprivations of the spirit, they, too, were of the 
soil and the race. Hawthorne absorbed history 
from the land, as he had absorbed its natural look; 
and he went on from this secular understanding of 
New England to a spiritual understanding, striving 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 35 

to follow its dark and secret thought. This was the 
climax of his genius. His range, from first to last, 
was thus broadly inclusive. 

What was, perhaps, fundamental in this slow and 
orderly unfolding of Hawthorne's genius was his 
brooding temper, his ability to see things long and 
repeatedly and to let them sink in, to think ''long 
thoughts," like the boy in Longfellow's poem remi- 
niscent of his own youth, and in general to be con- 
tent with reverie and dream and meditation in lieu 
of more active pursuits. Though he shows little 
obvious influence of the sea in his works, except 
by the presence of such topics as any citizen of a 
seaport would naturally take up, one associates this 
brooding temper with the sea-strain in his heredity. 
He had sea-blood ; and that, perhaps, told most in a 
certain moodiness and melancholy that underlay his 
genius and that was, unfortunately, favored and 
intensified by the mode of his life after leaving col- 
lege and in the opening years of manhood. But, 
whatever its cause, meditation came natural to him, 
and hours of solitary thought and secret musing, 
indoors and outdoors as well; it was thus that his 
genius ripened in lonely places. This isolation gave 
him leisure and concentration, and he used them to 
appropriate New England's present and past, as they 
came into his view. The completeness with which 
he did this showed in the high sentiments of his his- 
toric imagination and in the human sympathy of his 
contemporary observations; but it was not in the 



36 HAWTHORNE 

picturesque adornment of his native history, nor in 
feehng sketches of Hfe as he saw it, that he was 
to paint most intimately the spirit of New England. 
He drew near, as it were in concentric circles, like 
a bird of prey, to the core of the New England 
mystery, — the sense of evil at the heart of life, sin 
and its ways with the soul. The penance of con- 
science that follows on acted sin, like an inward 
vengeance slowly spreading outward on the face of 
things, the working out of the ancient curse on the 
children to the third and fourth generation, the 
transformation wrought in the innocent by the 
knowledge of good and evil, such that it seems the 
very birth of the soul itself, — these were the topics 
that finally evolved the full force of his genius and 
the perfection of his art. The common ground of 
all these was his Puritan heredity; not that he set 
forth in his tales the doctrinal beliefs of the an- 
terior age, but the true source of his interest in 
these themes was in his blood and breeding; they 
stand relieved against that antique history, and 
draw their imaginative substance and spiritual 
breath from that old "orthodoxy," as it came to be 
called. The earlier age, Jonathan Edwards and his 
virile race of the old clergy, had gone by; now from 
their dark thoughts and fervid experiences a moral 
heredity had been distilled, a moral imagination had 
been generated, and Hawthorne in his creations and 
meditations spoke for a special culture, markedly 
religious at bottom, diffused through his community. 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 37 

His creations were the fruit of his meditations. 
Thought was at their basis. More and more, as 
will be illustrated, an abstract element entered into 
his imagination. It is in the quality of this element 
that his New Englandism is most intense. The New 
Englanders were a thinking people, and both their 
thought about life and their experience of life were 
steeped in the old "orthodoxy," however much lib- 
eralism had made, here and there, rifts and pockets, 
as it were, in the common mass. Hawthorne repre- 
sented this people, and, especially in his major 
works, their spiritual stamina and the dark air in 
which it throve. A deeper, but not unusual, shade 
belonged to his temperament, it may be, than w^as 
generally found; there may be some question as to 
the value of his insights, or the success, historically, 
of his portrayals; but there is no doubt as to the 
place and character of his main interest. That lay 
in the fortune of the soul under sin. Again and 
again, in the small and in the large, he set it forth. 
In this he most completely fulfilled his function, not 
merely of describing the land and displa3ang the 
chronicles of New England, but of being, by grace 
of the imagination, its true historian. 

There is still another phase of his representative 
character in relation to his society. The mental 
manners and customs of New England at that day 
were marked and peculiar. The age, naturally, had 
an intellectual cut of its own, as well as a moral 
and religious habit. The common books of that 



38 HAWTHORNE ' 

time often seem very old-fashioned, not only by 
their pictures, but by the character of their senti- 
ments and their fancies. It must be acknowledged 
that some of Hawthorne's early writings seem like 
lessons in an old New England reader; nor did his 
literary consanguinity with the times end there. 
The books of our fathers, like those of modern days, 
have their fates; but if one is able to recall, by 
chance, the magazine literature of that period, or, 
better still, the annuals, keepsakes and that order of 
compositions, the kind of blood-relationship that is 
here in mind will be plain. Jones Very, an ad- 
mirable poet of Salem, if one should turn his pages, 
will give some sense of the moral atmosphere of the 
society with which Hawthorne was in contact. Best 
of all, perhaps, Sylvester Judd's once famous novel 
—-famous, at least, in limited circles — Margaret, 
illustrates the imaginative quality of the period. It 
is in Hawthorne's pages that this vein is found in its 
permanency, a vein so subtle, so fine, so tenuous, at 
times, that its presence almost escapes the senses. 
There was a diaphanous quality in the New Eng- 
land imagination then, a delicacy of thought and 
feeling, native to that climate, which found expres- 
sion in a "visionary sense." Hawthorne often so 
projected his dream as reverie; and in his firmest 
creative work something of this illusory feeling in- 
terleaves the pages. New England was then a place 
of imagination. 



OLD NEW ENGLAND 39 

In these various modes Hawthorne gathered into 
a focus of genius the Hfe of New England, — its 
landscape, its annals, its superstitions and its faith, 
its fantasy and its dreaming ways. 



CHAPTER II 

TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 

HAWTHORNE was, preeminently, an observer 
and a moralist; or, to state it more broadly 
and justly, he was both artist and thinker, and with 
the progress of life, naturally, the mind counted for 
more than the eye. The objects of observation and 
meditation, which came within the scope of his inter- 
ests in the juvenile years of his literary life and be- 
fore his mind had concentrated and settled on its 
main bases of thought and tendency in mature man- 
hood, were miscellaneous. In this earlier and ex- 
tremely varied portion of the mass of his writings 
his genius is more experimental and discursive, with 
traits of youth; but for that very reason the con- 
tinuous stream of short tales that came from his 
pen up to middle life discloses more plainly the 
nature of his mental growth. His journals show 
rich traces of a wandering mind as well as of a 
strolling habit ; they are studded with what one can 
only call "fancies," — ideas and suggestions to be 
worked out; and the miscellaneousness of these is 
only a degree greater than that of the tales them- 
selves. His artistic creations, indeed, are the mo- 
tions of a wandering mind. The stories, at times, 

40 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 41 

reflect his interest in vagabondage and in oddities of 
character; they often reveal his Hking for the pic- 
turesque, the processional, the formal speech of an 
older fiction, or give a pageant effect to the scenes 
presented; they are full of decorative instinct, of 
that half unconscious artistic feeling for the beauti- 
ful, the exquisite and the subtle, that denotes the 
artist born. 

The final concentration of Hawthorne's mind 
upon moral themes, and his treatment of them by 
symbolical modes, was a very gradual process and 
seems to have been dependent on that maturity 
of the mind which comes with time. He would not 
have been a New Englander if he had not brooded 
on moral phenomena. But besides this fundamental 
predisposition of his intellectual interests, supported 
and reinforced by the temper of the community 
where he lived, his artistic attention was constantly 
caught and excited by any concrete sight or circum- 
stance, any incident or tale or floating fancy, which 
had a moral meaning or which could be made to 
suggest one. He was first of all an observer; he 
was only secondarily a thinker, given to meditation ; 
his mind worked originally in surfaces, images, 
fancies. The quality of thought that arises in 
imagination becomes philosophical and truly medi- 
tative only after the abstract element makes itself 
plainly apparent ; in Hawthorne's case this involved 
the transformation of a physical image into a sym- 
tpl. Th^t was his artistic rnethod of philosophizing. 



42 HAWTHORNE 

But the method was seldom, if ever, quite equal to 
the task. The result is a continual failure of the 
art to express the thought; the art falls silent; the 
thought ceases to appear. The natural motion of 
the artist, in such a case, is to fall back on the 
artistic element in his work, on the concrete, the 
definite, the vivid, and so to lose himself in material 
realities. 

Hawthorne relinquished slowly the less imagi- 
native elements in his work, such as historic and 
legendary fact and the contemporary actualities he 
observed and noted in his native city and its New 
England surroundings. Until the time of the novels, 
he was, in his tales, a thoroughly local New Eng- 
lander; nor did he lose much of the flavor of the 
soil in either The House of the Seven Gables or 
The Blithedale Romance, while The Scarlet Letter 
merely removes his provincial guise and habit 
a few generations. He was, in fact, a contempo- 
rary of all his books, and wrote them, so to speak, 
from his own generation. He did not transcend 
his own time by any gift of education, sympathy 
or travel. It follows from this that he was sub- 
stantially a man of his parish, — one might say an 
antiquary of his parish. The innumerable tales of 
the New England precinct, present and past, real 
and fanciful, by farmstead and woodland and sea- 
side, of so many sorts and conditions of men, attest 
how profoundly and variously he was sympathetic 
with his own people, their history, and the soil. His 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 43 

genius, as it grew free in his greater works, did not 
detach him from his inheritance; it rather urged 
him, as he matured, into the ancient moral channels 
of his folk; but through all his development, with 
his growth in moral depth and artistic subtlety, in 
the knowledge and the means of truth, he held 
close to his New England nature, breeding and ex- 
perience. Not so provincial as Whittier, not so 
"parochial" (to use James's word) as Thoreau, he 
was infinitely less the cosmopolite than Lowell, Irv- 
ing or Longfellow. The word, cosmopolitan, in- 
deed, hardly applies to the Americans of that age; 
as for Hawthorne, he was, first and last, the New 
Englander. 

This is most plainly evident, as is natural, in those 
early writings where the sense of locality is most 
marked, the product of the duller years in the lonely 
chamber at Salem, of which he made so much men- 
tion, in the time when he waited long for fame to 
come to him. Realism of the most obvious and 
every-day kind played a large part in his composi- 
tions; they were, seemingly, condensations of what 
may have been his daily diary, things seen from his 
window or on his walks. Commonplace as these 
slight essays may have been in their day, and jour- 
nalistic in the sense of having been written for the 
day's or the week's reading, and being often of the 
nature of small talk on humble topics, they have 
acquired with time an antiquarian value, like diaries 
of our grandfathers; they reproduce with fidelity 



44 HAWTHORNE 

the look, the mood, the concerns of that quiet, old- 
fashioned, early nineteenth-century countryside, and, 
besides, its intellectual and moral habit. 

It is not the flow of life itself, but the mere aspect 
of things that is most recorded. The scene is usu- 
ally of large horizons, of the day's events, or of the 
road. There is an order of time in these descrip- 
tions of what goes on from hour to hour for the 
eye to note in mundane surroundings and happen- 
ings; but, on the whole, it must be admitted that 
the little essays often seem chronicles of Lilliput. 
Spread out the earth and go up into a steeple to sur- 
vey it, and you gain a certain unity of view, a 
panoramic sweep; but it is at the cost of nearness 
to the human world. Some such sense of distance 
from his kind pervades Hawthorne's local descrip- 
tions. He found a solitude about him wherever he 
looked. He takes his umbrella and goes out for a 
walk in the wet evening ; he sees the mudhole at the 
corner and the flash of colored lights in the thor- 
oughfare, the lovers falling into a puddle, — all there 
is to be seen, in fact, on a dark and stormy night; 
and then he goes back to be comfortable and alone 
in "the chamber" that he has left, this time, at 
least, only in fancy. Little journeys like this, he is 
fond of. They may take him only to the town 
pump, or they may take him as far as Nantucket; 
or perhaps he rambles with only the fancy of the 
bell-man's ding-dong, crying the lost, in his head. 
Be they far or near, matter of fact or matter of 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 45 

fancy, they are compact of realism, — gravestones, 
toy-shops, the menagerie, sugar-plums, organ- 
grinders, an endless medley. Now and then a scene 
as clear-cut and lively as a Bewick tail-piece occurs. 
Here is one, fresh from Salem's Asiatic trade : 

"I see vessels unlading at the wharf, and precious 
merchandise strewn upon the ground, abundantly 
as at the bottom of the sea, that market whence 
no goods return, and where there is no captain nor 
supercargo to render an account of sales. Here, 
the clerks are diligent with their paper and pencils, 
and sailors ply the block and tackle that hang over 
the hold, accompanying their toil with cries, long 
drawn and roughly melodious, till the bales and 
puncheons ascend to upper air. At a little distance 
a group of gentlemen are assembled round the door 
of a warehouse. Grave seniors be they, and I would 
wager — if it were safe in these times to be respon- 
sible for any one — that the least eminent among 
them might vie with old Vicentio, that incomparable 
trafficker of Pisa. I can even select the wealthiest 
of the company. It is the elderly personage, in 
somewhat rusty black, with powdered hair, the 
superfluous whiteness of which is visible upon the 
cape of his coat. His twenty ships are wafted on 
some of their many courses by every breeze that 
blows, and his name — I will venture to say, though 
I know it not — is a familiar sound among the far 
separated merchants of Europe and the Indies." 



46 HAWTHORNE 

These vignettes of small scenes are innumerable 
in Hawthorne's local writings. They are even more 
brief, scarcely outline sketches, in those articles 
whose method of construction is simply a tying-up 
of infinite detail, such as the narrative of the inci- 
dents of the day at the toll-bridge. It was a 
famous bridge in those times, the old Essex bridge 
that led from Salem to Beverly across the river, 
where a broad arm of the sea made inland. On its 
timbers, he says, the travel of the north and east 
continually throbbed : and he details the nondescript 
procession of the road from the first fragrant load 
of hay before dawn to the noonday glare, the stop- 
page of traf^c when the eastern schooner "sticks" 
in the draw, on till the gleam of the island light- 
house far seaward follows the sunset glow. The 
scene is a picture of an old New England sea- 
side day. 

"Here, in a substantial family chaise, setting forth 
betimes to take advantage of the dewy road, come 
a gentleman and his wife, with their rosy-cheeked 
little girl sitting gladsomely between them. The 
bottom of the chaise is heaped with multifarious 
band-boxes, and carpet-bags, and beneath the axle 
swings a leathern trunk, dusty with yesterday's 
journey. Next appears a four-wheeled carryall, 
peopled with a round half dozen of pretty girls, 
all drawn by a single horse, and driven by a single 
gentleman. Luckless wight, doomed, through a 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 4Z 

whole summer day, to be the butt of mirth and mis- 
chief among the frolicsome maidens ! Bolt upright 
in a sulky rides a thin, sour-visaged man, who, as 
he pays his toll, hands the toll-gatherer a printed 
card to stick upon the wall. The vinegar- faced 
traveller proves to be a manufacturer of pickles. 
Now paces slowly from timber to timber a horse- 
man clad in black, with a meditative brow, as of one 
who, whithersoever his steed might bear him, would 
still journey through a mist of brooding thought. 
He is a country preacher, going to labor at a pro- 
tracted meeting. The next object passing town- 
ward is a butcher's cart, canopied with its arch of 
snow-white . cotton. Behind comes a *sauceman,' 
driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of 
corn, beets, carrots, turnips, and summer squashes; 
and next, two wrinkled, withered, witch-looking old 
gossips, in an antediluvian chaise, drawn by a horse 
of former generations, and going to peddle out a 
lot of huckleberries. See there, a man trundling 
a wheelbarrow load of lobsters. And now a milk 
cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green can- 
vas, and conveying the contributions of a whole 
herd of cows in large tin canisters. 



*'The draw being lifted to permit the passage of 
a schooner, laden with wood from the eastern 
forests, she sticks immovably, right athwart the 
bridge! Meanwhile, on both sides of the chasm, 



48 HAWTHORNE 

a throng of impatient travellers fret and fume. 
Here are two sailors in a gig, with the top thrown 
back, both puffing cigars, and swearing all sorts of 
forecastle oaths; there, in a smart chaise, a dash- 
ingly dressed gentleman and a lady, he from a 
tailor's shopboard and she from a milliner's back 
room — the aristocrats of a summer afternoon. And 
what are the haughtiest of us but the ephemeral 
aristocrats of a summer's day? Here is a tin ped- 
lar, whose glittering ware bedazzles all beholders, 
like a travelling meteor or opposition sun; and on 
the other side a seller of spruce beer, which brisk 
liquor is confined in several dozens of stone bot- 
tles. Here comes a party of ladies on horseback, 
in green riding habits, and gentleman attendant; 
and there a flock of sheep for the market, patter- 
ing over the bridge with a multitudinous clatter of 
their little hoofs. Here a Frenchman, with a hand 
organ on his shoulder ; and there an itinerant Swiss 
jeweller. 



"Far westward now^ the reddening sun throws a 
broad sheet of splendor across the flood, and to the 
eyes of distant boatmen gleams brightly among the 
timbers of the bridge. Strollers come from the 
town to quaff the freshening breeze. One or two 
let down long lines, and haul up flapping flounders, 
or cunners, or small cod, or perhaps an eel. Others, 
and fair girls among them, with the flush of the 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 49 

hot day still on their cheeks, bend over the railing 
and watch the heaps of seaweed floating upward 
with the flowing tide. The horses now tramp 
heavily along the bridge, and wistfully bethink them 
of their stables. Rest, rest, thou weary world! for 
to-morrow's round of toil and pleasure will be as 
wearisome as to-day's has been; yet both shall bear 
thee onward a day's march of eternity. Now the 
old toll-gatherer looks seaward, and discerns the 
light-house kindling on a far island, and the stars, 
too, kindling in the sky, as if but a little way be- 
yond; and mingling reveries of heaven with remem- 
brances of earth, the whole procession of moral 
travellers, all the dusty pilgrimage which he has 
witnessed, seems like a flitting show of phantoms 
for his thoughtful soul to muse upon." 

Through this busy day it is curious to observe 
how Hawthorne, just as in the wet evening, keeps 
the solitude of the spectator. It is as if these figures 
and objects passed in a mirror. Far deeper is the 
solitude in which he plunges himself by the sea- 
side. Photographic as are his impressions of land 
scenes, of the village street, the kitchen garden, the 
deep woods at Concord or the more open roadside 
country, it is the sea that he most absorbs into his 
spirit, and reproduces with the tones, almost, of 
nature herself. A thousand small scenes recur to 
the memory familiar with his deep-water pages. 
He does not tell of the blue sea itself, as the 



50 HAWTHORNE 

sailor knows it; he always views it from the land, 
as an ancient poet preferred, and thus it is coast- 
scenery he describes ; but with what a pencil for mi- 
nutiae, for shadings and aspects ! and with the frank- 
ness of a solitary, of one who does not fear to be 
overheard ! and with v/hat an intimacy with the ob- 
ject! His day by the seashore gathers up many 
days, no doubt. Did one ever find, except in boy- 
hood, as many objects as he catalogues in one stroll? 
To review briefly his pleasures of "hours and 
hours," what a perfect description of beach birds 
is this ! and how vivid is the sweep and thunder of 
the chasm, that follows ! 

"I made acquaintance with a flock of beach birds. 
These little citizens of the sea and air preceded me 
by about a stone's throw along the strand, seeking, 
I suppose, for food upon its margin. Yet, with a 
philosophy which mankind would do well to imitate, 
they drew a continual pleasure from their toil for 
a subsistence. The sea was each little bird's great 
playmate. They chased it downward as it swept 
back, and again ran up swiftly before the impending 
wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore 
them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as 
one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In 
their airy flutterings they seemed to rest on the 
evanescent spray. Their images — long-legged little 
figures, with gray backs and snowy bosoms — were 
seen as .^^tinctly as the realities in the mirror of the 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 51 

glistening strand. As I advanced they flew a score 
or two of yards, and, again alighting, recommenced 
their dalliance with the surf wave; and thus they 
bore me company along the beach, the types of 
pleasant fantasies, till, at its extremity, they took 
wing over the ocean and were gone. 



**Here is a narrow avenue, which might seem to 
have been hewn through the very heart of an enor- 
mous crag, affording passage for the rising sea to 
thunder back and forth, filling it with tumultuous 
foam, and then leaving its floor of black pebbles 
bare and glistening. In this chasm there was once 
an intersecting vein of softer stone, which the waves 
have gnawed away piecemeal, while the granite 
walls remain entire on either side. How sharply, 
and with what harsh clamor, does the sea rake back 
the pebbles, as it momentarily withdraws into its 
own depths! At intervals the floor of the chasm 
is left nearly dry; but anon, at the outlet, two or 
three great waves are seen struggling to get in at 
once; two hit the walls athwart, while one rushes 
straight through, and all three thunder as if with 
rage and triumph. They heap the chasm with a 
snow-drift of foam and spray. While watching this 
scene, I can never rid myself of the idea that a 
monster, endowed with life and fierce energy, is 
striving to burst his way through the narrow pass. 
And what a contrast, to look through the stormy 



52 HAWTHORNE 

chasm, and catch a glimpse of the calm bright sea 
beyond!" 

Does it seem a mere waste of time to watch beach 
birds and great rollers, like this? As Hawthorne 
himself says on the next page, — "child's play be- 
comes magnificent on so grand a scale." Let us 
write our names on the sand then ! 

*'Draw the letters gigantic, so that two strides 
may barely measure them, and three for the long 
strokes! Cut deep that the record may be perma- 
nent! Statesmen and warriors and poets have 
spent their strength in no better cause than this. 
Is it accomplished ? Return then in an hour or two 
and seek for this mighty record of a name. The 
sea will have sv^^ept over it, even as time rolls its 
effacing waves over the names of statesmen and 
warriors and poets. Hark, the surf wave laughs 
at you!" 

But one can not follow the solitary through the 
infinite riches of his idleness. Even here a boat 
on the sea seems neighborly, or distant children 
playing on the sand; but, as man comes nigh, he 
flees to a deeper retreat, a recess so characteristic 
of his rocks, so intimate with his spirit in early man- 
hood, that the passage may well seem a chronicle of 
autobiography : 

**It is pleasant to gaze down from some high 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 53 

crag and watch a group of children gathering peb- 
bles and pearly shell, and playing with the surf, 
as with old Ocean's hoary beard. Nor does it in- 
fringe upon my seclusion to see yonder boat at 
anchor off the shore, swinging dreamily to and fro, 
and rising and sinking with the alternate swell; 
while the crew — four gentlemen, in roundabout 
jackets — are busy with their fishing-lines. But, 
with an inward antipathy and a headlong flight, do 
I eschew the presence of any meditative stroller 
like myself, known by his pilgrim staff, his saunter- 
ing step, his shy demeanor, his observant yet ab- 
stracted eye. From such a man, as if another self 
had scared me, I scramble hastily over the rocks, 
and take refuge in a nook which many a secret 
hour has given me a right to call my own. I would 
do battle for it even with the churl that should pro- 
duce the title deeds. Have not my musings melted 
into its rocky walls and sandy floor, and made them 
a portion of myself? 

"It is a recess in the line of clififs, walled round by 
a rough, high precipice, which almost encircles and 
shuts in a little space of sand. In front, the sea 
appears as between the pillars of a portal. In the 
rear, the precipice is broken and intermixed with 
earth, which gives nourishment not only to clinging 
and twining shrubs, but to trees, that gripe the rock 
with their naked roots, and seem to struggle hard 
for footing and for soil enough to live upon. These 
are fir-trees; but oaks hang their heavy branches 



54 HAWTHORNE 

from above, and throw dov/n acorns on the beach, 
and shed their withering foliage upon the waves. 
At this autumnal season the precipice is decked with 
variegated splendor; trailing wreaths of scarlet 
flaunt from the summit downward; tufts of yellow- 
flowering shrubs, and rose-bushes, with their red- 
dened leaves and glossy seed berries, sprout from 
each crevice; at every glance, I detect some new 
light or shade of beauty, all contrasting with the 
stern, gray rock. A rill of water trickles down the 
cliff and fills a little cistern near the base. I drain 
it at a draught, and find it fresh and pure. This 
recess shall be my dining hall. And what the feast ? 
A few biscuits made savory by soaking them in sea- 
water, a tuft of samphire gathered from the beach, 
and an apple for the dessert. By this time the little 
rill has filled its reservoir again ; and, as I quaff it, 
I thank God more heartily than for a civic banquet, 
that He gives me the healthful appetite to make a 
feast of bread and water. 

"Dinner being over, I throw myself at length 
upon the sand, and, basking in the sunshine, let my 
mind disport itself at will. The walls of this my 
hermitage have no tongue to tell my follies, though 
I sometimes fancy that they have ears to hear them, 
and a soul to sympathize. There is a rragic in this 
spot. Dreams haunt its precincts and flit around 
me in broad sunlight, nor require that sleep shall 
blindfold me to real objects ere these be visible. 
Here can I frame a story of two lovers, and make 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 55 

their shadows Hve before me and be mirrored in the 
tranquil water, as they tread along the sand, leaving 
no footprints. Here, should I will it, I can summon 
up a single shade, and be myself her lover. Yes, 
dreamer, — but your lonely heart will be the colder 
for such fancies. Sometimes, too, the Past comes 
back and finds me here, and in her train come faces 
which were gladsome when I knew them, yet seem 
not gladsome now. Would that my hiding-place 
were lonelier, so that the past might not find me! 
Get ye all gone, old friends, and let me listen to the 
murmur of the sea, — a melancholy voice, but less 
sad than yours. Of what mysteries is it telling? 
Of sunken ships and whereabouts they lie? Of 
islands afar and undiscovered, whose tawny chil- 
dren are unconscious of other islands and of con- 
tinents, and deem the stars of heaven their nearest 
neighbors? Nothing of all this. What then? Has 
it talked for so many ages and meant nothing all 
the while ? No ; for those ages find utterance In the 
sea's unchanging voice, and warn the listener to 
withdraw his interest from mortal vicissitudes, and 
let the infinite idea of eternity pervade his soul. 
This is wisdom." 

A vein of moralizing, it will be observed, slightly 
colors even the least of these wayside discourses, 
and variegates them like the sea-rocks so often 
under his feet. Now it is a streak of yellow or pink 
that steals on the drab and the gray, — some jocu- 



56 HAWTHORNE 

larity about girls' dresses, or a bit of old-fashioned 
sentiment; now it is of a soberer hue, shadows of 
mortality on the page ; and not seldom it is black as 
the ebon rifts in the native granite of the sea cliffs, 
— the solid gloom of the ancient time. Though one 
accepts melancholy as an inseparable part of Haw- 
thorne's genius, one wonders, at times, at his grave- 
yard fancies. Apart, however, from the tomb, 
itself, which was prolific of thought and fancy, as 
well as of ghosts, in the age when he was born, there 
is an infusion of morality in his writings, more 
nearly akin to the sermonizing of the period than to 
its sepulchral sentiment. Those were days when the 
coarser terrors of life were vividly painted, in the 
interest of reform; but the terrors of thought, 
though they did not reach the ghastliness of the 
former age, were by no means forgotten, and came 
not far behind. The troop of sorrows that Gray, 
the poet of the country graveyard, was accustomed 
to marshal, still came at the literary call. They ap- 
peared in full costume when Hawthorne waved his 
wand, as, for example, in that description of a wake- 
ful night which he calls "The Haunted Mind." The 
passage, though interesting for its New England 
phantasms, appeals most directly to the reader for 
the authentic view of the famous "chamber," with 
which it begins and ends, as with a snap-shot 
photograph : 

"You peep through the half-drawn window cur- 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 57 

tain, and observe that the glass is ornamented with 
fanciful devices in frostwork, and that each pane 
presents something like a frozen dream. There will 
be time enough to trace out the analogy while wait- 
ing the summons to breakfast. Seen through the 
clear portion of the glass, where the silvery moun- 
tain peaks of the frost scenery do not ascend, the 
most conspicuous object is the steeple; the white 
spire of which directs you to the wintry lustre of 
the firmament. You may almost distinguish the 
figures on the clock that has just told the hour. 
Such a frosty sky, and the snow-covered roofs, and 
the long vista of the frozen street, all white, and 
the distant water hardened into rock, might make 
you shiver, even under four blankets and a woolen 
comforter. Yet look at that one glorious star! Its 
beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and 
actually cast the shadow of the casement on the 
bed, with a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, 
though not so accurate an outline." 

Now, the graveyard! 

"You think how the dead are lying in their cold 
shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear win- 
ter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy 
that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow 
is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter 
blast howls against the door of the tomb. That 
gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and 
throw its complexion over your wakeful hour,'* 



58 HAWTHORNE 

And now, the family of sighs ! 

"In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and 
a dungeon, though the Hghts, the music, and revelry 
above may cause us to forget their existence, and the 
buried ones, or prisoners, whom they hide. But 
sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, these dark re- 
ceptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, 
when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no 
active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, 
imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power 
of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your 
griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse 
not break their chain. It is too late! A funeral 
train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion 
and Feeling assume bodily shape, and things of the 
mind become dim spectres to the eye. There is 
your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wear- 
ing a sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, 
with a hallowed sweetness in her melancholy fea- 
tures, and grace in the flow of her sable robe. Next 
appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust 
among her golden hair, and her bright garments 
all faded and defaced, stealing from your glance 
with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she 
was your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call, 
her Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, 
with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron 
authority; there is no name for. him unless it be 
Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 59 

your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected 
yourself by some error at the outset of life, and 
were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. 
See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the dark- 
ness, the wTithed lip of scorn, the mockery of that 
living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore 
place in your heart! Do you remember any act of 
enormous folly at which you would blush, even in 
the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize 
your Shame. 

"Pass, wretched band! Well for the wakeful one, 
if, riotously miserable, a fiercer tribe do not sur- 
round him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds 
its hell within itself. What if Remorse should as- 
sume the features of an injured friend? Wliat if 
the fiend should come in woman's garments, with 
a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down 
by your side? What if he should stand at your bed's 
foot, in the likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain 
upon the shroud ? Sufficient, without such guilt, is 
this nightmare of the soul; this heavy, heavy sink- 
ing of the spirits ; this wintry gloom about the heart; 
this indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself 
w^ith the darkness of the chamber." 

And now, once more, the chamber where *'fame 
was won!" 

"The slumbering embers on the hearth send forth 
a gleam which palely illuminates the whole outer 



60 HAWTHORNE 

room, and flickers through the door of the bed- 
chamber, but cannot quite dispel its obscurity. Your 
eye searches for whatever may remind you of the 
Hving world. With eager minuteness you take note 
of the table near the fireplace, the book with an 
ivory knife between its leaves, the unfolded letter, 
the hat, and the fallen glove. Soon the flame van- 
ishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though 
its image remains an instant in your mind's eye, 
when darkness has swallowed the reality." 

The darker shades of thought that occasionally 
fall on Hawthorne's reflective page are obvious 
here, and they sufficiently illustrate the diffusion 
through his earlier pieces of the Puritan heredity 
which he shared with the community, and which in 
his later years concentrated his meditative art on 
the touch and presence of evil in the soul. Equally 
temperamental in himself, and also of the times, 
was the delicacy of his spirit in creative work; the 
fragility — what may better be styled the insubstanti- 
ality — of his imaginative figures, the dreamlike at- 
mosphere, the air of reverie, the omnipresence of 
fancy, are partly individualistic, especially in their 
degree, but they also have the "form and pressure" 
of the age ; the airy phantasm was as frequent with 
him as the distempered dream. There is a striking 
contrast between the solid characters, shown with 
firm motion in the colonial tales — Puritans like 
Scott's Presbyterians — and this frailer breed of a 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 61 

later generation, both of life and literature. It is 
evident that, in his early years, the touch of history 
was to Hawthorne like the touch of earth to Antaeus 
of old; it gave him life. In the first essays of his 
unassisted imagination, there was some uncertainty; 
his achievement was apt to be rather a vision than 
an illusion of reality. One should not press the point 
too much. The fashion of literature, like other 
fashions, passes away. It may be only a change of 
taste that is involved. The essential matter is to 
realize that Hawthorne was a man of his own time 
in his moods of imagination as well as in his dark 
Puritan humors. 

This environment, the outward aspect of which 
has been fully illustrated, he reacted from by an 
extraordinary isolation; it threw him back sharply 
on his literary heredity for the nurture of his talents. 
He was a constant reader in those Salem years, and 
it naturally followed that the eighteenth century 
claimed him as a belated, that is, a colonial, child, 
and the early nineteenth impressed contemporary 
traces upon him. From the former he had that 
pellucid style, whose American flow began with 
Washington Irving and ceased with his own pen, 
and, to mention a detail, that mood of the grave- 
yard, already noted, which, though deeply rooted 
in the Puritan temperament, had its literary memo- 
rial in Gray's "Elegy'* and left its great American 
boulder in "Thanatopsis" ; and he was allied to his 
own generation, it must be owned, by an occasional 



62 HAWTHORNE 

touch of sentimentality. Scott early taught him 
how to stage the theatrical tableau in an episode. 
Such marks of literary ancestry and of his time are 
easily to be discerned, as his work grows under his 
hand and year succeeds to year; and they are to be 
ascribed, in the main, to his studies, his readings, 
which occupied his mind more than ^'sights from a 
steeple'* or walks by Marblehead rocks, — more, 
perhaps, tha'n the "thousands upon thousands of 
visions" that he says he saw in his lonely chamber. 
\A genius is, in part, the product of a thousand 
subtleties, — literary breeding, social environment, 
humanity pressing upon it in many ways; Haw- 
thorne, in all his isolation, was not exempt from 
this moulding; but in its essence genius is original 
power, and obeys its own instincts. 

Hawthorne's life in early manhood was thus un- 
commonly secluded. However thronged with phan- 
toms of the mind, it was sterile in external ex- 
perience. He describes it, himself, as a semi-vital 
existence. Nor was the case much bettered when he, 
at last, emerged from the Salem chamber into the 
dull and ordinary publicity of the business of the 
community. Whether he occupied himself as a 
"measurer" in the Boston Custom House, or spaded 
the "gold-mine," as he euphoniously styled the 
manure heap at Brook Farm, or collected his slim 
salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a year as 
"surveyor" in the custom-hou»se at Salem, he was 
unable to be content with his part in the common 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 63 

lot. There was always, of course, the rigid line, 
dividing his existence into two lives, one humdrum 
with mortal tasks, and the other imaginative, medi- 
tative, spiritual. He never found vital air in "prac- 
tical life"; as soon as he breathed that atmosphere, 
he began to be asphyxiated; "this earthly cavern 
where I am now buried," he writes of his Boston 
office, and, again, "my darksome dungeon . . . 
into which dismal region never comes any bird of 
paradise." On the other hand he never tires of 
minute observation, of day-dreaming, of moral 
analysis, and of recombining these mental elements 
in his life in imaginative creation in his tales. The 
activity of his mind throws into strong contrast, at 
times, the triviality of the matter on which it is em- 
ployed. One grows more and more aware of the 
fineness of the mental quality, and also of the pov- 
erty of the matter of life involved. Here is a 
natural artist, one says, — sensibility, imagination, 
temperament, — but he starves. 

Hawthorne was not indifferent to his surround- 
ings nor impatient of them. He made the most of 
what his eyes saw, and of the suggestions that arose 
in his heart and imagination. He cultivated his 
experience, indeed, with great assiduity and econ- 
omy. A necessity seemed laid upon him to set down 
in words the scenes and meditations that made up 
his day, as if a spell were upon him to make a record 
of what passed and only his pen would relieve the 
ever-present need of expression. The circle of ex- 



64 HAWTHORNE 

perience within which he worked was narrow; but 
it was minutely scanned, as if he would make up by 
scrutiny and penetration what there was lacking in 
extent. He slowly took possession of the object 
and completely absorbed it, whatever it might be; 
but, in the process of absorption, an artistic element 
was at work, a thing of selection and modification, 
of suggestion oftentimes, which gave a special char- 
acter to the image or the thought, and made them 
Hawthornesque. This belonged to the artist in 
Hawthorne. It is true that the charm operated even 
on the trivial and meager, in daily life; its fascina- 
tion, in some sort, is over all he wrote; but the spell 
was ever seeking a wider horizon, an atmosphere of 
greater freedom from the pressure of the actual, 
an ether of more delicate and secret life, in which 
to work its full power of magic and mystery. In a 
word, Hawthorne's genius, as it grew more and 
more aware of itself in its mastery of expression, 
though sensitive to its environment on every side, 
and, indeed, in a true sense its product, seems seek- 
ing to escape from it. His genius had, as it were, 
an instinct of escape, which slowly found a larger 
world. What really happened to Hawthorne, how- 
ever, was that, as he grew, his mind became stored 
with the experiences of past generations and of 
other times, and his imagination operated on this 
new material. The fresh matter came in the shape 
of history or of local tradition; it was not purely 
imaginary, but it offered less resistance to the ar- 



TALES OF AX ELDER DAY 65 

tistic touch than did the matter-of-fact of the sub- 
stantial environment in the scenes of the Salem 
countn'side and the characters of the village. 
Habitually in the note-books, occasionally in the 
tales, and especially in the stor}- of Blithedale. Haw- 
thorne dealt with reality, as he saw it, — with the 
commonplace, the contemporar}*, and the usual, how- 
ever it might be picked out with romantic color, 
now and then; but it was not in such work that his 
genius took wing. These passages, charming as 
they often are by virtue of some secret touch of 
glamour or of memory, give up their charm, in the 
main, only to a reader with a certain affection for 
New England. The true romancer — the magician 
— requires another and imaginary sphere. He found 
it slowly, and he did not always inhabit it; he did 
not, at the best, inhabit it altogether ; and from time 
to time he "harked back,'* as the old savins: was, 
to the "real" world and actual things. He made his 
first adventures in the imaginary world most not- 
ably by attempts to reconstruct colonial scenes, with 
a solid historical core, and history proved itself a 
good hand-maid to romance, as it has often done. 
The colonial tradition, in brief, was a main avenue 
of his escape from the environment in which he 
found himself in his youth. On what other scenes, 
indeed, should he exercise his imagination than those 
that formed his mental horizon, — the legendary 
"Sabbaths" of old Witch Lane, the sea-tragedies of 
!Marblehead beaches, the historic episodes of Salem 



66 HAWTHORNE 

streets? For days he would sit, at Salem, in an 
alcove of the Athenaeum library reading, with only 
one other person in another alcove. What sights 
would interest his "mind's eye" more, amid that 
solitude, than the stately figures of the former age 
at the old Province House, near by in Boston, or the 
ancient worthies of his ow^n Puritan city in its early 
years ; and who could set the mould for his imagina- 
tion to display the panorama of sixty or a hundred 
years before with more certainty than the great 
"Author of Waverley"? When Hawthorne's eyes 
ceased to rest on the falling snow in the winter twi- 
light, or on the tasks of the sea-beach or the com- 
mon sights of the town-life, it was on the ancestral 
scenes of his own people that he most delighted to 
look in fancy, and it was with such a wand as Scott's 
that he summoned up the vision. In these episodes 
of "the times before,'* as they were depicted by his 
pen, both he and his subjects were at their best. It 
is true that in the humbler scenes from the days 
that had gone by there is a more delicate, if less ob- 
vious charm; but for boldness, power and concen- 
tration, what piece of historical imagination have 
our records finer than the tale of "Endicott and the 
Red Cross"? or, more impressive still because of its 
element of mystery, "The Gray Champion"? The 
story is of the New England, where American 
liberty began. It is a scene from a land of long 
ago ; but it holds its colors well. It was long a popu- 
lar taJe. 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY Ci? 

Stories of this sort find a true home in the peo- 
ple's heart. They are hke the old tale of King Al- 
fred and the cakes, that is almost the first glimpse of 
history that many of us ever had. They smell of 
antiquity, and give substance to a nation's whole 
past. In the nature of things there can not be many 
such, with so wide and so long an appeal to a nation's 
instincts. "The Gray Champion," however, has a 
number of less distinguished kindred among Haw- 
thorne's imaginary revivals of colonial times. The 
series of the "Tales of the Province House" is the 
most brilliant group of these, both for romantic 
color and historical illusion. "Old Esther Dudley" is 
a dame no Bostonian of "the old race" ever for- 
gets, and "Sweet Alice Vane" still has her gentle 
gallants, however unknown. Quite apart, too, from 
the local color and human attraction of such figures 
in the colonial drama, reminiscent of the gentlemen 
and fashions of buried time, there is, besides, in 
these legends that something Hawthornesque 
which discloses a temperament, and marks them 
as from an artist's hand. These sketches all tran- 
scend reality by their simplification; thence comes 
that impression they make of something elemental 
in them, which of itself proclaims them works of 
art. They bear traces of Hawthorne's genius, as a 
statue keeps the marks of the soil from which it 
has been dug. His personality has passed into the 
story created in his imagination. In a certain de- 
gree this is true also of his note-books, of his bor- 



68 HAWTHORNE 

rowings from his observations, and of the contempo- 
rary portrayals at BHthedale ; but, broadly speaking, 
his genius makes a purer impress in proportion as 
he recedes from the actual in circumstance, charac- 
ter and event. In other words, his genius first found 
that larger world it sought, with entire freedom and 
opportunity to develop its power, by brooding over 
and dreaming in and recreating the colonial tradition 
which was the background of himself and the com- 
munity in which he dwelt. 

Hawthorne's genius, however idiosyncratic it 
may appear, will never be dissociated from his com- 
munity ; the two are revealed together. So comple- 
mentary do they appear that it would seem, at some 
moments of reflection, that only by the light of 
that genius could the Puritan community, in a true 
sense, have been visibly set forth, and again that 
only that community could have been the proper 
medium to display his genius. The reality was seen 
through his temperament, and the two tended more 
and more to be fused in one union ; but, in the ear- 
lier years, the communal element was more evident, 
in the avowedly historical sketches and local scenes, 
— portraits of places, rightly so-called, alike from 
their method and their theme; while the tempera- 
ment of the writer counts for more, his individu- 
ality makes a larger contribution, in proportion as 
he passes from the general to the private life. In 
narrating the excursion of Goodman Brown into the 
Essejc woods, in attendance on the witches' Sabbath, 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 69 

Hawthorne summons up the ghosts of the whole 
Satanic countryside of that far-off day, and all he 
accomplishes by it is to unsettle the Goodman's faith 
in the honesty and virtue of his neighbors; but the 
lesson implied as to the doubt of every-day appear- 
ances, is less prominent than the orgy of diabolism 
itself. How curiously lacking in imagination those 
orgies in the forest now seem to us, though faithful 
to the crude and childish fancies of the time ! What 
is read in the tale, in the main, is less the eternal 
lesson of the possibilities of hypocrisy — by no means 
a novel and not at all an improving lesson — than the 
simple phantasmagoria of a superstitious and much 
bedeviled age. To take another instance of com- 
munal coloring in the hundred short tales of Haw- 
thorne, the commonplace incidents told in *'The 
Wives of the Dead" set forth circumstances and 
moments of customary tragedy in the houses of a 
seacoast village. The story is told out of the life 
of the time, out of the occupations and the fatality 
of humble people in the usual routine of work and 
sleep and death ; but it is drenched with Hawthorne's 
temperament. No other pen could have written it. 
In quite a different way, "Drowne's Wooden Im- 
age," is yet more individual and Hawthornesque, 
to use the term that best designates the thing. It 
has to do with an artist temperament in a carver 
of wood, and with the transformation that love 
wrought upon his skill, when once he carved a 
figure for the bowsprit of a ship. The tale belongs 



70 HAWTHORNE 

with the small group in Hawthorne's works that 
deal directly with the experiences of the artistic life. 
The humbleness of the wood-carver and his associ- 
ation with ships fit in with the community; but his 
talent, vitalized as it was by love, was a thing of 
personal delicacy, and the power to evoke it from 
the environment was Hawthorne's peculiar spell. 

Hawthorne's genius, indeed, penetrated his ma- 
terial to such a degree as to take complete possession 
of it, though the finished blend may seem to have 
more of realism in one place and more of fancy in 
another. Whether the community or the tempera- 
ment of the writer comes more to the fore, it is the 
romance of New England that the page gives up, — 
the New England of a romantic imagination, now 
almost as well established in tradition as history 
itself. It is not merely that Hawthorne sheds the 
sympathetic and penetrative light of indigenous 
genius upon a thousand facets of the life and cir- 
cumstances where New England was bred by the 
sea and in the upland on the edge of the early and 
withdrawing wilderness ; he did this, and it is won- 
derful with what a fulness of miscellaneous illustra- 
tion of the people, the times and the interests of old 
New England he has made his works a deposit, as 
it were, of past generations; but amid all this di- 
versity of age and sex and circumstance, of era 
and creed, of history and legend, of the look of the 
forest and the sea and the meadows, he drew nearer 
and nearer, as he grew older in art and wisdom, to 



TALES OF AN ELDER DAY 71 

the heart of it all, to the spell of the soil that placed 
all these things in a spiritual medium, wrapped them 
in it and saw them through it ; in other words, first 
of all, his material was neither dramatic nor pic- 
turesque, not merely human, neither emotional nor 
esthetic, but it was simply and above all moral ma- 
terial; nothing else in it greatly counted for him; 
and it was by this preoccupation with and pene- 
tration into the secret of New England — old New 
England — that he became the great New England 
romancer, and its historical embodiment in our na- 
tional literature. 

There was a younger aspect of the New England 
that has now become old New England in Haw- 
thorne's tales for children. The presence of child- 
hood in his minor works is a noticeable trait and 
often gives a gleam of sunshine and a tender touch 
to his musings or descriptions; but nowhere with 
such a concentrated charm and brightness as in the 
group of eager countenances that listened to the 
youthful story-teller of the Greek myths, which 
themselves seem independent of time. The two 
clusters of Hawthorne's Tanglewood stories stand 
quite apart from his other work, in an ideal realm 
of their own; but, in one case, they are framed, as 
it were, on a background of rural pictures of the 
Berkshire year, exquisitely beautiful, like little 
fresco squares of the seasons on which the childish 
groups are relieved, as it might be in Italian paint- 
ing; and, in the second case, the listeners are felt. 



72 HAWTHORNE 

if not seen, so familiar has the essential situation 
of story-telling become in the series. The old New 
England where these tales were told was as real as 
the snow-storm with which this volume began, as 
the fishing-village and Concord and Blithedale. All 
these elements melt now into one field of memory, 
reaching back in the far distance to witchcraft days, 
the Gray Champion and the unchanging rock-bound 
coast. It is this field of memory that Hawthorne's 
imagination enlightens, while he draws from it the 
truths of life. 



CHAPTER III 
Hawthorne's artistic method 

THE artistic method of an original genius sel- 
dom seems to be deliberate; it appears, rather, 
to begin in instinctive motions and to be developed 
largely by experiment. In Hawthorne's earlier work 
there is no intention discernible except to write ; the 
topic may be this or that, but the incitement is plainly 
self-expression, to publish what is interesting in his 
own mind to himself, something fanciful, it may be, 
or something reportorial in the form of a sketch, 
past or present or in no man's land. Mental ac- 
tivity, supported by a sharp eye and a reflective 
turn of thought, explains fully, perhaps, the begin- 
nings of his genius. As time went on, however, a 
promise of organizing power grew visible, a nascent 
genius with a bent of its own; and though there 
was nothing wholly novel in the method that began 
to show, yet Hawthorne so subdued it to his per- 
sonality, and released his genius in great measure 
by it, that it has come to be characteristically his, 
and qualifies his literary memory. There is much 
of his writing in which this artistic method does not 
enter, or is slightly used when employed at all; a 
good portion of his work was miscellaneous or non- 
73 



74 HAWTHORNE 

descript; but as he attempted imaginative creation, 
he relied upon his method more and more till it 
was practically exhausted, so far as it was service- 
able to him. It is most convenieiit to examine it in 
the major short tales of imagination, where it is 
most clear. 

The primary element in Hawthorne's art is the 
image, clearly and vividly grasped by the eye. It is 
an image, like others, out of the general flux, or 
flow of sensations that make up our impression of 
the outer world as a moving picture. Its appeal 
to him was due to the strength of his power of ob- 
servation, and it afforded the sensuous basis of his 
genius. But he was not only an observer, he was a 
thinker ; and, more than a thinker, he was a brooder 
upon thought, — often, upon one thought. The idea, 
the second element in his art, belongs in a higher 
region than sensation, in a world whose principle is 
intellectual order rather than temporal sequence — 
that is, in the universal world of thought, not in the 
world of events. The effort of art is to blend these 
two worlds, — to pass from the world of the image to 
the world of the idea, and accumulate truth on the 
way without loss of distinctness in the vision. Haw- 
thorne was an expert in the process, for he had tried 
it in many forms. He was well endowed for the at- 
tempt, both by his eye for the image and his mind 
for the idea. He was equally at home in the world 
of sense and in that of thought; he would use the 
former to express the latter, for the former is pri- 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 75 

mary, at first, as the latter is fundamental at last. 
To observe his fortunes with his task is to have a 
lesson in the ways of a genius with his art. 

Hawthorne, in that portion of his general work 
which is capital in importance, was accustomed to 
select some simple object, such as a veil or a flower 
or a butterfly, and then by gradual touches to give it 
secret and mysterious significance till the object, 
whatever it was, became a sort of fetish to the mind, 
— a thing whose meaning and essential nature was 
wholly apart from its outward seeming. The image, 
so presented, always had a relation to an idea, some- 
times in one way, sometimes in another. He gazed 
at the image, as one looks at a crystal globe, accord- 
ing to old stories, till he saw something; by a process 
of repetition, suggestion, echo, which may briefly 
be described as overlay, and by a profound artistic 
concentration of interest, curiosity and mystery, he 
charged the image with mental meaning until it 
seemed to deny its original nature, and become, with 
various degrees of success, a thing of thought in- 
stead of sense. It is sometimes customary to de- 
scribe this method of writing'as allegory; but it is 
an inexact expression and does not discriminate be- 
tween the many ways in which the spell is woven. A 
simple case is the tale of "The Minister's Veil." The 
story is that a minister wore a veil for many years 
over his face so that none should see his features. 
The idea developed is, of course, the secrecy of 
men's hosoms. The veil is ^'allegorical," and 



76 HAWTHORNE 

"stands for" the impenetrable curtain of the human 
breast. But Hawthorne's tale is more delicately told 
than these words imply. The veil, the physical ob- 
ject, is moralized and becomes a type, the universal 
garment of secrecy, and the particular minister 
himself, whatever his story, fades into a class of 
men ; both veil and minister have entered into the in- 
tellectual w^orld. 

The main theme of this tale — the solitude of a 
man's bosom — had a potent fascination for Haw- 
thorne. He was himself of a solitary nature and 
accustomed to the unheard voices that deepen soli- 
tude. His understanding of such natures came from 
sympathy, grounded upon much intimate acquaint- 
ance with loneliness. The Puritan heredity in him, 
the moral prepossession of his genius, gave direction 
to his thoughts and, especially in this field, a dark 
color to his imaginations; the secrecy of men's bos- 
oms, in itself a normal and necessary incident of life 
— and there are happy as well as dark secrets — be- 
came another name for hypocrisy, or it suggested 
the gloom natural to religious musings in those parts 
and in the age from which for the most part his 
genius derived its traits. Solitary natures w^ith a 
guilty sense were, through life, a main theme of 
his brooding; the situation, indeed, w^as one of his 
fixed ideas, from which his imagination never freed 
itself. 'In the Protean changes of such a creative 
idea it is natural to find the notion of suppressed 
crimes recur again and again in his work, and also 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 77 

to discover in his description of the motions of the 
human breast something of the knowledge and skill 
of a confessor. It is here, in particular, that the 
psychologist is seen at work, as it were in his study, 
upon the diseased heart, to draw out its secret. 
Hawthorne, before he had run his course, made this 
feature a cardinal element in his novels. 

In the tale of "The Minister's Veil" the relation 
of the image to the idea is obvious ; there is no true 
fusion of the two, but each is kept clearly apart. 
The union between the sensuous and mental ele- 
ments grows more close in other narratives, and a 
certain scale, denoting their approach, might be 
taken almost as an index of the artistic success of 
the method. In "Lady Eleanor's Mantle" the proud 
and haughty Lady Eleanor is presented from the 
first as already in moral isolation by her character, 
which is summarized and expressed in the rich man- 
tle she wears; but this moral isolation is made evi- 
dent only by the physical isolation which results 
from the dread and secret contagion hidden in the 
folds of the garment. The very sign and outward 
seat of her pride, the mantle, is the center and source 
of her humiliation; from being the one who casts 
off, she becomes herself an outcast from human so- 
ciety. The physical union of the image with the 
person involved is closer than in the instance of the 
veil; and there results from this a sense of subtler 
fusion between the image and the idea itself. This 
intimate fusion is still more keenly felt in the tale 



78 HAWTHORNE 

of "The Birthmark,'' at the conclusion of which the 
moral lesson is drawn that imperfection is the nec- 
essary condition of mortality to the degree that with 
its removal death must supervene, just as, when the 
birthmark fades, the woman dies. A still greater 
blend of the physical image with the person is found 
in ''Rappaccini's Daughter," the woman who has 
inhaled the fragrance of the poison-tree until she is 
herself its living flower. In the cases mentioned the 
physical image is, in an ascending scale, more com- 
pletely personified; and the mental idea is, corre- 
spondingly, more vitally expressed. 

The fusion of the image with the idea, without 
the intervention of a human person, is more curi- 
ously wrought out in what is by far the most subtle 
of Hawthorne's tales in this manner, both in thought 
and workmanship, 'The Artist of the Beautiful." 
The artist is, here, indeed, an intermediary in the 
process ; but the image in no way enters into his own 
personality, — on the contrary, it proceeds from the 
artist, as a creation. The Butterfly is his work — a 
mechanical toy, perhaps; or, perhaps, it is a ''spir- 
itualization of matter." What else is all art but a 
spiritualization of matter? The story of his work is 
told with infinite knowledge, — how it began, how it 
was broken off, how it was finished, and also what 
was its worth to the artist, when he had succeeded. 
The union of the image with the idea in this tale 
amounts to identity: it is complete. The idea ab- 
sorbs the image, and leaves it, at the end, a thing of 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 79 

"little value," like the "glittering fragments" in the 
infant's palm at the conclusion of the story, which 
illustrates the method of Hawthorne's art, in this 
regard, at its highest power : 

"But to return to Owen Warland. It was his for- 
tune, good or ill, to achieve the purpose of his life. 
Pass we over a long space of intense thought, yearn- 
ing effort, minute toil, and w^asting anxiety, suc- 
ceeded by an instant of solitary triumph : let all this 
be imagined ; and then behold the artist, on a winter 
evening, seeking admittance to Robert Dan forth' s 
fireside circle. There he found the man of iron, with 
his massive substance thoroughly warmed and at- 
tempered by domestic influences. And there was 
Annie, too, now transformed into a matron, with 
much of her husband's plain and sturdy nature, but 
imbued, as Owen Warland still believed, with a finer 
grace, that might enable her to be the interpreter 
between strength and beauty. It happened, likewise, 
that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at 
his daughter's fireside; and it was his well-remem- 
bered expression of keen, cold criticism that first en- 
countered the artist's glance. 

"'My old friend Owen!' cried Robert Danforth, 
starting up, and compressing the artist's delicate fin- 
gers with a hand that was accustomed to gripe bars 
of iron. 'This is kind and neighborly to come to us 
at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had be- 
witched you out of the remembrance of old times.' 



80 HAWTHORNE , 

" *We are glad to see you T said Annie, while a 
blush reddened her matronly cheek. 'It was not like 
a friend to stay from us so long.' 

" 'Well, 0\ven,' inquired the old watchmaker, as 
his first greeting, 'how comes on the beautiful? 
Have you created it at last ?' 

"The artist did not immediately reply, being 
startled by the apparition of a young child of 
strength that was tumbling about on the carpet, — a 
little personage w^ho had come mysteriously out of 
the infinite, but with something so sturdy and real 
in his composition that he seemed moulded out of 
the densest substance which earth could supply. 
This hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, 
and setting himself on end, as Robert Danforth ex- 
pressed the posture, stared at Owen with a look of 
such sagacious observation that the mother could 
not help exchanging a proud glance with her hus- 
band. But the artist was disturbed by the child's 
look, as imagining a resemblance between it and 
Peter Hovenden's habitual expression. He could 
have fancied that the old watchmaker was com- 
pressed into this baby shape, and looking out of 
those baby eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the 
malicious question : — 

" 'The beautiful, Owen ! How comes on the beau- 
tiful? Have you succeeded in creating the beauti- 
ful?' 

" 'I have succeeded,' replied the artist, with a mo- 
mentary light of triumph in his eyes and a smile of 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 81 

sunshine, yet steeped in such depth of thought that it 
was almost sadness. *Yes, my friends, it is the truth. 
I have succeeded/ 

" Indeed!' cried Annie, a look of maiden mirth- 
fulness peeping out of her face again. 'And is it 
lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?' 

" 'Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come,' an- 
swered Owen Warland. 'You shall know, and see, 
and touch, and possess the secret! For, Annie, — if 
by that name I may still address the friend of my 
boyish years, — Annie, it is for your bridal gift that 
I have wrought this spiritualized mechanism, this 
harmony of motion, this mystery of beauty. It 
comes late, indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, 
when objects begin to lose their freshness of hue and 
our souls their delicacy of perception, that the spirit 
of beauty is most needed. If, — forgive me, Annie, 
— if you know how to value this gift, it can never 
come too late.' 

"He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel 
box. It was carved richly out of ebony by his own 
hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of pearl 
representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, 
elsewhere, had become a winged spirit, and was fly- 
ing heavenward ; while the boy, or youth, had found 
such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended 
from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial at- 
mosphere, to win the beautiful. This case of ebony 
the artist opened, and bade Annie place her finger 
on its edge. She did so, but almost screamed as a 



82 HAWTHORNE 

butterfly fluttered forth, and, alighting on her fin- 
ger's tip, sat waving the ample magnificence of its 
purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in prelude to a 
flight. It is impossible to express by words the 
glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which 
were softened into the beauty of this object. Na- 
ture's ideal butterfly was here realized in all its per- 
fection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as 
flit among earthly flowers, but of those which hover 
across the meads of paradise for child-angels and 
the spirits of departed infants to disport themselves 
with. The rich down was visible upon its wings; 
the luster of its eyes seemed instinct wdth spirit. 
The firelight glimmered around this wonder — the 
candles gleamed upon it; but it glistened apparently 
by its own radiance, and illuminated the finger and 
outstretched hand on which it rested with a white 
gleam like that of precious stones. In its perfect 
beauty, the consideration of size was entirely lost. 
Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind 
could not have been more filled or satisfied. 

"'Beautiful! beautiful!' exclaimed Annie. Ts it 
alive? Is it alive?' 

" 'Alive ? To be sure it is,' answered her husband. 
'Do you suppose any mortal has skill enough to 
make a butterfly, or w^ould put himself to the trouble 
of making one, when any child may catch a score of 
them in a summer's afternoon? Alive? Certainly! 
But this pretty box is undoubtedly of our friend 
Owen's manufacture; and really it does him credit.' 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 83 

"At this moment the butterfly waved its wings 
anew, with a motion so absolutely lifelike that Annie 
was startled, and even awestricken; for, in spite of 
her husband's opinion, she could not satisfy herself 
whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of 
wondrous mechanism. 

" *Is it alive ?' she repeated, more earnestly than 
before. 

" 'Judge for yourself,' said Owen Warland, who 
stood gazing in her face with fixed attention. 

"The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, flut- 
tered round Annie's head, and soared into a distant 
region of the parlor, still making itself perceptible to 
sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of its 
wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed 
its course with his sagacious little eyes. After flying 
about the room, it returned in a spiral curve and set- 
tled again on Annie's finger. 

" *But is it alive ?' exclaimed she again ; and the 
finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted 
was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to 
balance himself with his wings. *Tell me if it be 
alive, or whether you created it.' 

" 'Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beauti- 
ful?' replied Owen Warland. 'Alive? Yes, Annie; 
it may well be said to possess life, for it has absorbed 
my own being into itself; and in the secret of that 
butterfly, and in its beauty, — which is not merely 
outward, but deep as its whole system, — is repre- 
sented the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, 



84 HAWTHORNE 

the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I cre- 
ated it. But' — and here his countenance somewhat 
changed — 'this butterfly is not now to me what it 
was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of 
my youth.' 

" *Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything,' said 
the blacksmith, grinning with childlike delight. 'I 
wonder whether it would condescend to alight on 
such a great clumsy finger as mine ? Hold it hither, 
Annie.' 

"By the artist's direction, Annie touched her fin- 
ger's tip to that of her husband; and, after a mo- 
mentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from one to 
the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, 
yet not precisely the same, waving of wings as in 
the first experiment ; then, ascending from the blacks 
smith's stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually enlarg- 
ing curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep 
around the room, and returned with an undulating 
movement to the point whence it had started. 

" 'Well, that does beat all nature !' cried Robert 
Danforth, bestowing the heartiest praise that he 
could find expression for; and indeed, had he 
paused there, a man of finer words and nicer percep- 
tion could not easily have said more. *That goes be- 
yond me, I confess. But what then? There is more 
real use in one downright blow of my sledge hammer 
than in the whole five years' labor that our friend 
Owen has wasted on this butterfly.' 

**Here the child clapped his hands and made a 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 85 

great babble of indistinct utterance, apparently de- 
manding that the butterfly should be given him for 
a plaything. 

''Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at 
Annie, to discover whether she sympathized in her 
husband's estimate of the comparative value of the 
beautiful and the practical. There was, amid all her 
kindness towards himself, amid all the wonder and 
admiration with which she contemplated the marvel- 
lous work of his hands and incarnation of his idea, a 
secret scorn — too secret, perhaps, for her owai con- 
sciousness, and perceptible only to such intuitive dis- 
cernment as that of the artist. But Owen, in the lat- 
ter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of the region 
in which such a discovery might have been torture. 
He knew that the w^orld, and Annie as the represent- 
ative of the world, whatever praise might be be- 
stowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the 
fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recom- 
pense of an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by 
a material trifle, — converting what was earthly to 
spiritual gold, — had won the beautiful into his handi- 
work. Not at this latest moment was he to learn 
that the reward of all high performance must be 
sought within itself, or sought in vain. There was, 
however, a view of the matter which Annie and her 
husband, and even Peter Hovenden, might fully 
have understood, and which would have satisfied 
them that the toil of years had here been worthily 
bestowed. Owen Warland might have told them 



86 HAWTHORNE 

that this butterfly, this plaything, this bridal gift of a 
poor watchmaker to a blacksmith's wife, was, in 
truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have pur- 
chased with honors and abundant wealth, and have 
treasured it among the jewels of his kingdom as 
the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the 
artist smiled and kept the secret to himself. 

" 'Father,' said Annie, thinking that a word of 
praise from the old watchmaker might gratify his 
former apprentice, *do come and admire this pretty 
butterfly.' 

" 'Let us see,' said Peter Hovenden, rising from 
his chair, with a sneer upon his face that always 
made people doubt, as he himself did, in everything 
but a material existence. 'Here is my finger for it 
to alight upon. I shall understand it better when 
once I have touched it.' 

"But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, 
when the tip of her father's finger was pressed 
against that of her husband, on which the butterfly 
still rested, the insect drooped its wings and seemed 
on the point of falling to the floor. Even the bright 
spots of gold upon its wings and body, unless her 
eyes deceived her, grew dim, and the glowing purple 
took a dusky hue, and the starry luster that gleamed 
around the blacksmith's hand became faint and van- 
ished. 

" 'It is dying ! it is dying !' cried Annie in alarm. 

" 'It has been delicately wrought,' said the artist, 
calmly. 'As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual es- 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD S7 

sence — call it magnetism, or what you will. In an 
atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite sus- 
ceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him 
who instilled his own life into it. It has already lost 
its beauty; but in a few moments more its mech- 
anism would be irreparably injured.' 

" Take away your hand, father !' entreated Annie, 
turning pale. 'Here is my child; let it rest on his 
innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life will revive 
and its colors grow brighter than ever.' 

"Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his 
finger. The butterfly then appeared to recover the 
power of voluntary motion, while its hues assumed 
much of their original luster, and the gleam of star- 
light, which was its most ethereal attribute, again 
formed a halo round about it. At first, when trans- 
ferred from Robert Danforth's hand to the small 
finger of the child, this radiance grew so powerful 
that it positively threw the little fellow's shadow 
back against the wall. He, meanwhile, extended his 
plump hand as he had seen his father and mother do, 
and watched the waving of the insect's wings with 
infantine delight. Nevertheless, there was a certain 
odd expression of sagacity that made Owen War- 
land feel as if here were old Peter Hovenden, par- 
tially, and but partially, redeemed from his hard 
skepticism into childish faith. 

" 'How wise the little monkey looks !' whispered 
Robert Dan forth to his wife. 

" *I never saw such a look on a child's face/ an- 



88 HAWTHORNE 

swered Annie, admiring her own infant, and with 
good reason, far more than the artistic butterfly. 
The darhng knows more of the mystery than we 
do.' 

"As if the butterfly, hke the artist, were conscious 
of something not entirely congenial in the child's 
nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At 
length it arose from the small hand of the infant 
with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward 
without an effort, as if the ethereal instincts with 
which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled 
this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. 
Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared 
into the sky and growai immortal. But its luster 
gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its 
wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a 
sparkle or two, as of Stardust, floated downward 
and lay glimmering on the carpet. Then the butter- 
fly came fluttering down, and, instead of returning 
to the infant, was apparently attracted towards the 
artist's hand. 

" 'Not so ! not so !' murmured Ow^n Warland, as 
if his handiwork could have understood him. 'Thou 
has gone forth out of thy master's heart. There is 
no return for thee.' 

"With a wavering movement, and emitting a 
tremulous radiance, the butterfly struggled, as it 
were, towards the infant, and was about to alight 
upon his finger ; but while it still hovered in the air, 
the little child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 89 

and shrewd expression in his face, made a snatch at 
the marvellous insect and compressed it in his hand. 
Annie screamed. Old Peter Hovenden burst into a 
cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith, by main 
force, unclosed the infant's hand, and found within 
the palm a small heap of glittering fragments, 
whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And 
as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what 
seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was 
yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly 
than this. When the artist rose high enough to 
achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made 
it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value 
in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the en- 
jo3mient of the reality." 

It is plain that Hawthorne's art in this tale is 
quite different from, and goes far beyond that in 
such a narrative as *'The Gray Champion." The 
latter story was strong in both character and events, 
— a dramatic scene of action; the tale, the conclud- 
ing paragraphs of which have just been given, is 
carefully wrought in character and incident, with 
discriminating contrasts and finished interior scenes, 
but its strength lies, not in its action, but in its 
meaning; it is a moral, not an epic tale. Hawthorne, 
as he matured, wrote, as it were, a palimpsest ; there 
was a hidden writing underneath the script, and the 
script was only the key to what was beneath. He 
was, to this extent, indeed, a writer of allegory; 



90 HAWTHORNE 

but this would be an incomplete designation of his 
peculiar art, which was less simple than direct alle- 
gory. His art was, in fact, abstract, however con- 
crete it might be in superficial appearance; there 
was an increasing element of thought in it, and its 
significance grew with this element and his subtle 
skill in handling it ; something was continually being 
infused into description and incident, which fed 
them with meaning, till the very contents of the 
work became abstract, — one was in the presence of 
thought rather than mere life. In other words, he 
had worked out his craftsmanship; he had made the 
passage from sense to thought without loss of sharp- 
ness or vividness, and presented in his writings truth 
in place of facts, — that is, what is real in all persons 
instead of one only. The peculiarity of Haw- 
thorne's art is that the element of the abstract in 
it is so engrossing and takes so imaginative a form. 
Such a temperament as Hawthorne's is apt, in its 
history, to lose contact with art and become ab- 
sorbed in mere thought, to be simply intellectualized. 
The vigor of Hawthorne's imagination, however, — 
its clear visual edge or eye for the object, and his in- 
terest in sights and sounds, — withheld him from 
such an extreme ; and, indeed, he seems to have been 
one of that breed of thinkers who need some sub- 
stance to think in, as it were, — that physical object 
in which, as a matter of fact, he did so often think. 
To do his thinking so is the salvation of an artist. 
At another remove, in a higher region of thought. 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 91 

the mystic thinks in the symbol. Hawthorne, how- 
ever, was not a true symbolist ; he was a plain artist, 
— with the senses, the mind and the heart of an art- 
ist ; and he had, to an uncommon degree, that disin- 
terestedness which is thought in some quarters to 
be so valuable a trait of the artist, if not, indeed, 
indispensable. As an observer, in his note-books, 
it is noticeable to what an extent he simply mirrored 
what he saw, with what lucidity he gives it back. 
He seems, at times, to be only such a mirror of life, 
giving it back uncolored by his personality, as a 
pure medium. There was a negative side to him, 
a certain irresponsiveness, a lack of interest, a 
lethargy, a dulness; one looks in vain in his career 
for deep convictions or any enthusiasm of nature, 
and, in that age of many reforms and stirring pub- 
lic interests, his apathy is the more noticeable; the 
story of Blithedale and of Brook Farm displays him 
as practically untouched by the moral passions of 
his time. 

Such aloofness from contemporary affairs does 
not imply any lack of knowledge of them; on the 
contrary, it is abundantly evident that Hawthorne 
was well acquainted with the intellectual movement 
about him, its social experiments and quasi-scientific 
affiliations, such as Fourierism, mesmerism and the 
minor reforms in which his community was then 
so prolific ; but these things, despite his natural curi- 
osity, left him for the most part quite unconcerned. 
A certain stolidity of temperament was, perhaps, 



92 HAWTHORNE 

fundamental in him; at all events, his isolation, 
socially, due to his separation from the world in 
early manhood and his feeling that the current of 
life had left him thrown aside, had generated in 
him a sense of disengagement from the world, an 
attitude as if he were concerned only as an observer 
of life, which was uncommonly favorable to the 
mood of artistic disinterestedness. Whatever was 
the reason, the absence of vital contemporary inter- 
ests in him is obvious, and a capital fact. He was 
a pure artist, and his preferred world was the imag- 
ination ; he never descended from it and departed to 
mingle in the matters of practical life at the Boston 
or Salem Custom House, or at Blithedale, without 
falling into black moods of discouragement and the 
homelessness of the exile; always, at the touch of 
the world, his genius froze. Whether he dealt with 
the colonial tradition or with fables of his own in- 
vention, he was apart from the current realities 
about him ; he gradually freed his imagination from 
the aid of either historic or contemporary fact in the 
effort to enter into the universal world of pure art, 
which is valid without regard to time or place./ 

The instrument by which he reached this develop- 
ment was the physical image in various modifica- 
tions, which he transmuted into ideas of moral sig- 
nificance and universal import, proper to that world ; 
and he was aided in accomplishing this by his disen- 
gagement for long periods from intimate contact 
with the practical world, and by a disinterestedness 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 93 

of temperament, which appears to have been native 
with him. Convictions, except of a primary kind 
and proceeding from an indigenous morahty in his 
Puritan heredity, did not enter into his work; re- 
form, then rampant in the community, did not de- 
flect his art; indeed, it may fairly be said that he 
broadened morals more than morals narrowed him. 
He made the Puritan, for all his isolation in the wil- 
derness, a world-figure in literary art. Puritanism, 
a great moral phenomenon, has its most vivid Amer- 
ican literary record, for the world, in his work. The 
lesser moral phenomena of his own time left slight 
traces there, comparatively negligible, as in the story 
of Blithedale. Hawthorne's undeniable aloofness 
from contemporary life was thus rather a matter of 
his biography than of his genius. It was, indeed, 
favorable to his genius, a truly artistic aloofness, 
however undesigned or unwilling, which left his 
eye clear and his mind unpreoccupied and his heart 
unprejudiced; fundamentally he was of the Puritan 
inheritance, but to seek any more particular descrip- 
tion of his moral affinity with his own age would be 
futile. 

Picturesque aspects and romantic episodes of 
colonial history, the legend of the Indian, the pio- 
neer and the early settler, had been treated descrip- 
tively and at times poetized by the greater writers 
of our first literary awakening in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. In Longfellow and Whittier local tradition 
in New England had found its scribes, while truly 



94 HAWTHORNE 

continental themes and distant regions of the settle- 
ment had occupied the former, in his Indian and 
Acadian narratives. The fundamental secular myth 
of history had thus been recorded, defined and ex- 
panded in imaginative literature with ample breadth 
by both poets and novelists. The distinction of 
Hawthorne, peculiarly, was not that he was the most 
vivid romanticist among the many who fell heir to 
one or another portion of the Puritan tradition to 
which he most gave artistic form and color, but 
rather that he penetrated that tradition to its moral 
substance. That was the center of his interest, the 
very kernel of his meditation. What he presented 
was a series of dramatic episodes, longer or shorter, 
more or less loosely bound together, but they were, 
besides, moral scenes. The spell in them, which he 
relied on for fascination, was their moral meaning, 
— their significance, that is, to the life of the soul. 
His own eye obeyed this fascination; and though 
he minded well, artist-like, his garniture of facts in 
the physical world, his real intent was to bare the 
spiritual fact. His meditation was the sounder in 
that it worked through his imagination, his mind 
still thinking in the image, as was said above; but 
a conclusion of thought, in however imaginative a 
shape, was the end in view. 

It is this prepossession of his art with its moral 
theme, which accounts for the engrossing interest to 
him of the abstract element in his method, and par- 
ticularly for the marked exclusions that finally char- 



HAWTHORNE'S ARTISTIC METHOD 95 

acterlzed it. His interest was in states of the soul, — * 
not so much in the history of a soul, according to 
the Browning formula, but the states through which 
the soul, per se, that is, by its own nature, passes 
under the experience of lifeyTo state it negatively, 
he took the slightest interest in the events that orig- 
inally occasioned or led up to the spiritual crises in- 
volved, and he cared as little for the after fortunes 
of the persons in whom these crises arose; his sense 
of individual life, apart from its illustrative char- 
acter, is feeble; or, in other words, persons did not 
interest him, for, under no other supposition can one 
account for the negligent way in which he dismisses 
them, at the end of the play. - It follows that action 
is at its lowest value in his work, which finds its 
theme rather in the results of the action in the soul 
and their sequence there. The story grows more and 
more a psychological study, general in essence, of 
the nature of evil, or sin, in the soul's experience, 
when one comes to the core of Hawthorne's interest 
in human life; the abstract method he employs re- 
sults in a meditative vein in his work that can never 
be disregarded by his readers, for it is its substantive 
part ; but, it should be said, it is only in his maturer 
tales that these characteristics become plain and 
commanding elements. Nevertheless the germ of 
these developments can be clearly observed in the 
short stories that preceded the great novels. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 



THE colonial tradition of New England, as a 
written record, exists in many forms, — history, 
genealogy, legend. It finds in Hawthorne its imag- 
inative form, and one so distinguished by his genius 
that it bids fair to be the great literary memorial of 
that age. His genius was, perhaps, as is apt to be the 
case, an excess of temperament; and his peculiar 
rendering of the ''times before" results from the 
blend of his native instinct for the moral element in 
life, wherein he was true to race, with his artistic 
taste for a romantic investiture of it, which belonged 
rather to his personality. It may well be that dif- 
ferent readers will be aware of these two interests 
in various degrees; to one his tales will seem full 
of old moralities, to another full of old-fashioned 
scents like a garden of long ago, and to a very few 
these impressions will merge in one; but his works 
will bring the aroma of time to all. Hawthorne had 
an idiosyncratic power to gather this aroma, and 
wrap it in words. The House of the Seven Gables 
by its very name proclaims itself a nest of the old 
tradition. It has a family sound, and seems to con- 

96 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 97 

centrate in itself the story of generations. Indeed, 
one might better call the tale a myth than a novel; 
for it rises, as a myth builds itself up, out of secu- 
lar elements, though with realistic features. While 
it narrates individual lives and depicts particular cir- 
cumstances, it recalls a whole age. It signifies, as 
one reads, not a group of little lives, but a long 
period, an era, as it were. Taken in its obvious 
meaning, it is true, the story is one of the extinction 
of a family, really rather a slight sketch of shabby 
gentility worn threadbare; and it is complicated by 
the shadow of a crime in one generation and an an- 
cestral curse in another. The family tale, however, 
is so treated as to generalize a community, and par- 
ticularly to appeal to the affections of an old race for 
dying things, endeared by familiarity in youth. The 
mould of decay is over all that bygone life; the sim- 
plicity of its ways and circumstances deepens its 
peculiar pathos and gives it the value that belongs to 
an old man's memories of his early days; it is the 
past, romantically colored, — the past of a w^hole 
countryside, — that comes forth, like invisible writ- 
ing, on the page. 

The House of the Seven Gables, in unfolding 
the story of the family, concentrates attention on 
the situations and the persons. The tale moves for- 
ward by a succession of set scenes, each carefully 
elaborated, as if for its own sake, and the whole 
thus resembles a history told in tableaux. The mo- 
tive spring lies far in the background of events, and 



98 HAWTHORNE 

the method of construction recalls that secret his- 
tory, or machination, antecedent to the story, that 
Scott sometimes employed, as a means of unravel- 
ing his mystery. Thus the ancestral curse of witch- 
craft days is the furthest background of this family 
history, and nearer lies a second background in the 
prison life of Clifford, who is the male protagonist 
of the household drama. Both these, in which the 
plot of implacable fate and its means alike are to 
be sought, are left subordinate and in shadow, as 
was Hawthorne's way; he was not interested in 
events, but in states of mind. He throws his high 
lights on the scenes and the persons ; but the envel- 
oping plot, with its romantic accessories, — the ances- 
tral curse, the mythical "eastern estate," the prison 
of Clifford, — he leaves subsidiary, and often in his 
narrative hardly more than suggested. Places and 
figures, however, scenes, he stages with exquisite 
care for their subtleties, their refinement and signifi- 
cance to the eye and the mind ; especially, he gives 
them an atmosphere of penetrating old-time reality; 
and it is these things, in the main, that one carries 
away from Hawthorne in mind and memory. The 
local flavor, the flavor of the soil, is uncommonly 
strong, too; one feels that these are things that 
might have happened in Salem, — the picturesque, the 
pathetic, the sentimental things of a provincial, al- 
most a colonial city, of long ago. This union of 
highly developed individuality in the treatment, with 
universal human significance in the meaning, is the 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 99 

mark of Hawthorne's genius. It turned a parochial 
tale into a national memorial. 

It seems unlikely to the analyst of Hawthorne's 
genius that there was much method in its madness. 
The note-book, with which the reader is already 
familiar from the preceding chapters, was plainly a 
seed-plot from which whatever was fit was trans- 
ferred into new soil as from a nursery garden. This 
is the same process as that which accounts for *'old 
Moodie'^ in The Blithedale Romance. In The 
House of the Seven Gables it accounts for the 
scene of the hens. "Uncle Venner," with his fish- 
horn, might have been one of the "Sights from a 
Steeple." It is obvious, too, that Hawthorne's pro- 
longed apprenticeship to the short story had hard- 
ened a literary habit in him, more common in juve- 
nile than in mature work. He had become, to a 
certain extent, an artist in miniature. He was ac- 
customed, in his sketches and tales, to brief spaces, 
narrow horizons, few elements, and to labor on 
these with microscopic attention and infinite detail ; 
and the natural result was that, on attempting the 
larger task of a romance or novel, he fell into a 
method of agglomeration in art. He assembled his 
materials, as the phrase goes now, and they were 
apt, though they harmonized well enough, not to 
fuse entirely. The tale of The House of the Seven 
Gables, for example, is threefold, — the story of old 
Maule, that of Alice, and that of Clifford and his 
group; but they are separable parts; indeed, a later 



100 HAWTHORNE 

novelist of the more massive sort would have made 
three narratives of the matter. Similarly each 
scene, as it comes before the eye, seems a thing 
apart, as it were, and studied for itself. One is not 
keenly aware of the vital logic, binding the parts; 
and in a tale of hereditary guilt, this is a defect that 
would greatly impair its convincing power, were it 
not understood, in fact, that the curse is really an 
artistic convention, allowed purely for the sake of 
the story, since, otherwise, the story could not go on. 
In The House of the Seven Gables, the convention 
is the more readily granted, because it embodies tra- 
ditional truth, and thus gives the right historical 
perspective to the colonial tale. At the same time, 
quite apart from the three phases of the curse, the 
disparate materials of the story give the impression 
of miscellaneousness, of a rather varied collection 
of Hawthornesque items. The truth is that this is 
characteristic of Hawthorne's method, in his larger 
works. There is no mother-idea out of which they 
develop, with a single, overpowering, master life of 
their own. 

The small scale on which Hawthorne had been 
trained to work not only gives this multiple, miscel- 
laneous and somewhat uncorrelated character to his 
novels, but it underlies, most probably, his noticeable 
artistic economy. The principle of economy is, in- 
deed, fundamental in art, and happy is the talent 
that can command it in any way without loss. It 
may be the very flower of taste, as in some e:?camples 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 101 

of primitive or alien art; or it may only mask pov- 
erty of invention or insight. In Hawthorne, his 
habitual use of few characters and slight incidents 
is, perhaps, due to the early restrictions upon him 
of the short story or sketch, shut naturally in brief 
limits. There was not room for more. And the rule 
is the same for prose as for poetry: the briefer the 
lyric, the greater the perfection must be, both of sub- 
stance and of workmanship. Thus with Hawthorne, 
dealing habitually with few and slight elements in 
his art, elaboration of the material became a neces- 
sity, — hence, his detail, his minutiae, his shading, 
and all that exquisite refmement of surface and del- 
icacy of atmosphere in his work. His economy of 
material reaches, at times, almost to parsimony. 
And here, too, one is reminded of his garden days at 
Concord and the forest walks at Blithedale ; after all 
is said in his beautiful language, of the fallen au- 
tumn leaf like a drop of blood, the mosquito that 
was frost-bitten, and the gust of violets along a 
wood road, how little he had to see ! The elabora- 
tion of it in observation, in imagination, is marvel- 
ous; but to find artistic value in that countryside 
and in that anaemic life of the decaying gabled 
house in old Salem, what eyes he must have had, and 
what insight ! The parsimony was in his subject and 
environment, truly; but from this very fact he 
plucked no small part of the power that his genius 
developed, because his theme almost thrust upon him 
certain qualities of obsei*vation and workmanship 



102 HAWTHORNE 

wherein his greatness, as a writer, came to He. He 
belonged, in a certain sense, to what are called in 
the history of art, the *1ittle masters," by virtue of 
these qualities, in his tales, or portions of his ro- 
mances, done on a small scale ; his artistic economies 
allied him to their mode of work; and this manner, 
so far as he carried it over into his longer novels, in- 
jured the unity of impression in them so that one is 
apt to remember particular scenes in them rather 
than their general course and climax. It is the 
scenes, rather than the plot or the idea, that count ; 
in fact, one has to clarify the latter by thinking, be- 
fore they are quite clear. On the other hand, one 
sees the successive situations with great vividness. 

In other words, Hawthorne's art, in its greater 
examples, at least, was essentially composite, an add- 
ing of cell to cell. This method allowed him to 
avail himself with greater ease of the miscellaneous 
elements of his rather haphazard New England up- 
bringing among men and books. His mind was nat- 
urally acquisitive; and, however lax were his social 
instincts, he used his eyes with a good deal of inti- 
macy upon their objects. He really absorbed expe- 
rience, so far as it lay in the purview of observation ; 
shy and solitary as he was, it is unlikely that any one 
along that coast was more accurately familiar with 
its look and with the habits and thoughts of its folk 
and their forefathers. This knowledge, taken in 
bulk, was his race-inheritance, whether it came to 
him by direct observation of the things and people 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 103 

where he lived and walked, or by reading the homely 
memorials of the wilderness years in these same 
places. Eager and acute to see, to notice and to 
meditate what he saw, and with a sympathetic 
genius to interpret and to understand, because he 
was of the blood and knew the common past, he was 
an ideal historiographer of the community; but, 
besides, there was added to his blood the secret drop 
of artistic genius that made him a creator instead of 
a recorder of life. He put forth his works as things 
of imagination instead of chronicles, but their sub- 
stance was the life that had been lived, as he divined 
it after long observation and meditation; naturally 
there were many phases of this life, many peculiar- 
ities, many thoughts, and in taking possession of the 
riches of this inheritance he found a miscellany of 
things. A composite method was forced upon him. 
Hawthorne, himself, was aware of the greater 
kinship between him and the story of the old Salem 
house than existed in his other works. This tale 
was not so high-strung in imagination and moral 
feeling, and was more on the level of his familiar 
days; the less severe parts of the composition are 
hardly more than journalizing. In the story the 
things of the eye or the memory, such as the look 
of streets and gardens and their customary incidents, 
come easily, and almost without notice; situa- 
tion and dialogue, on the contrary, are more self- 
conscious, and the legend of Alice shows imagi- 
native tension; in some scenes one feels that they 



104 HAWTHORNE 

are set, and the death of the judge, wearisome and 
forced in style, is positively "staged," to use the 
critical word; but, notwithstanding, all these things 
proceed naturally from Hawthorne's cabinet and 
tastes, and represent the contents of his mind and 
heart more fully and characteristically than his 
other novels. The book familiarizes one with the 
author, more than any other of his writings. This, 
together with the abiding charm of the old life it 
represents, accounts for the favor, almost the affec- 
tion, in which it is held by lovers of Hawthorne, 
whatever may be said of its technique. Technique 
is the excellence of the understanding, in any case. 
Technique is posterior to genius, which is rather 
allied to what used to be called the pure reason, and 
acts by intuition. It is not because of any inferi- 
ority of technique, which some might be disposed 
to see in the miscellaneous character of the Salem 
story, that these remarks are made; but rather to 
illustrate and amplify the manner in which, before 
the golden age of ^'technique," free genius found 
out its way. 

It was the spirit of the artist, moving in the mass 
of inherited legend and environment which was 
Hawthorne's material, that compensated for any 
flaws and unconcerning defects in his work and gave 
it the fascination that has assured its long success. 
The artistic impulse was the master element in his 
genius that used his other qualities of observation 
and meditation merely as media of the creative light. 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 105 

It is curious to observe this artistic instinct at work 
in his recurring interest in the fine arts. He had a 
cousinly feehng for them, a predilection that, how- 
ever, was, perhaps, not rare in the New England of 
his early manhood, but was significant, rather, of its 
amateurish and awakening culture. One remem- 
bers the Salem interest in "Flaxman's designs," the 
reproduced masterpieces of painting on Hawthorne's 
furniture, the visits to the Boston Athenaeum treas- 
ures, in his American years; but, particularly, in 
connection with the tales, one recalls the aquatic fig- 
ure of *'Drowne's Wooden Image," and especially 
the marvelous mechanical toy of "The Artist of the 
Beautiful," with its profound esthetic meditation. 
How frequent and how various, too, is his use of the 
"portrait" ! The portrait was, indeed, a common 
romantic property, and often called into requisition 
in many lands. Hawthorne, like others, obeyed its 
fascinating eyes, and continually resorted to it for 
imaginative effect. In the "House of Seven Gables" 
itself, the portrait has a place of honor, with the 
deed of the "eastern estate," secreted behind it 
in the wainscot, it will be remembered, and is, 
in fact, the symbolic embodiment of the old ances- 
tral curse of the Pyncheon house. But, in Haw- 
thorne's work, the portrait was much more than a 
common romantic property. It indicated, by his re- 
peated use of it and in connection with other like 
matters, an underlying artistic impulse and inclina- 
tion to the beautiful in its pure forms that was 



106 HAWTHORNE 

fundamental in his genius. More than the observer 
or the morahst whom he is easily seen to be, he was 
born an artist; by native endowmient, and by the 
conditions, the impulse was loosed in literature, and 
resulted in an even more delicate, richer and more 
profound beauty in the expression of life by imagi- 
nation, thought and the charm of words; but the 
essentially esthetic quality of Hawthorne's genius 
is, perhaps, more apparent at first by his obvious 
cousinship in spirit with the wood-carver, the butter- 
fly maker, the painter and the sculptor, from first 
to last. He was, at least, a brother of all the crafts. 
This artistic impulse led him to study and arrange 
his material in detail, and to give the peculiarly ex- 
quisite finish that distinguishes his literary touch; 
but, in larger ways, it also taught him the sense of 
the enveloping harmonies within which a whole 
work of art is contained, — must, in fact, be con- 
tained; and to this instinct and sense must be at- 
tributed the numerous reduplications, echoes and 
gradations that combine to make up his major ef- 
fects and to unify them. Composite as his art is, 
a higher harmony enfolds its elements and reconciles 
them. This is due to his being, primarily, an artist 
in imaginative work, — a creator, as has been said, 
more than an observer or a moralist. 
' In the substance of his work, apart from the qual- 
ity and coloring of his material, Hawthorne w^as, 
preeminently, it need hardly be said, a psychologist. 
His place was on that fall of the wave, just beyond 



/ 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 107 

the crest of a literary movement, when, action and 
even character being exhausted as major themes, 
interest centers in analysis of motives, growths and 
conditions, that is, in the inner rather than the outer 
history of human nature, the underlying grounds of 
both action and character. In this development he 
anticipated the taste of the next age, and illustrated 
in fiction the vein of intellectual subtlety character- 
istic of New England culture from Edwards to 
Emerson. He did this without intention, without 
much thinking about it, as the rhodora blooms ; sim- 
ply it belonged to the soil to bloom so. The old re- 
ligion had made brooding on human nature, and 
especially its moral phases, almost congenital in the 
race, and the habit had been intensified in Haw- 
thorne by his situation in his maturing years; the 
secret alike of his meditation and of his observation 
was the lonely life of an active mind. His heredity 
concentrated his interest on the moral world; and 
being the child of that civilization, thinking over and 
ruminating its old thoughts, Hawthorne naturally 
found his deeper mental life a meditation on sin, 
especially on the ways of evil with a man, its work- 
ing in the breast and its results. In The House of 
the Seven Gables it is evil in the form of an in- 
herited curse rather than in the individual, it is true, 
— vengeance long drawn out ; or, if vengeance be too 
strong an expression, it is retribution, penalty, the 
inexorable debt that must be paid with time. The 
theme, the idea, is of the Puritan moral scheme — 



108 HAWTHORNE 

especially in the element of inheritance involved — 
and thus was native to Hawthorne ; but in his genera- 
tion its reality was hardly sufficiently felt to make it 
effective in fiction without a delicate touch and much 
management. At the end, indeed, the inherited curse 
of the house is the most tenuous part of the tale, 
while the entirely human character of Hepzibah 
stands clear in the foreground. 

Hawthorne's pro founder moral work, in fact, is 
to be found elsewhere. In this tale he was distracted 
from the main theme of sin, in human nature, by 
the half-romantic attraction of the curse, clinging to 
generation after generation, till it was finally solved 
in new lives; and he was also diverted from too 
serious a view by the fascination of the environment 
and atmosphere of old Salem, as it was known to his 
sympathies. The curse, after all, even in the very 
home of the w^itches, had come to be "an old wives' 
tale" ; try to vivify it as he might, Hawthorne could 
not make it credible as other than a romantic back- 
grotmd, fitting the locality and the figures; but this 
relaxation of the moral fiber of the story left more 
ample room, in which to unfold its gentle and hum- 
ble humanity. It is, indeed, a lifeless life, a faded 
bloom, that is disclosed in the old and shut-up house. 
All things have left it but an old sister's love; and 
hither, late in her years, comes back the broken fa- 
vorite brother, released from his unjust prison. They 
are victims of life, these two. The curse is but a 
story in their dimmed memories — how can it be 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 109 

thought to account for their Hves ? — but, for all that, 
one way and another, their lives are ruined. Hepzi- 
bah, the weary watcher of many years, is expecting 
her brother, and has made what feeble preparation 
she can for their common support by setting up the 
famous "cent-shop" in the basement story: 

"It has already been observed, that, in the base- 
ment story of the gable fronting on the street, an 
unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had fitted 
up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired 
from trade, and fell asleep under his coffin-lid, not 
only the shop-door, but the inner arrangements, had 
been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust 
of ages gathered inch-deep over the shelves and 
counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if 
it were of value enough to be weighed. It treasured 
itself up, too, in the half-open till, where there still 
lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor 
less than the hereditary pride which had here been 
put to shame. Such had been the state and condi- 
tion of the little shop in old Hepzibah's childhood, 
when she and her brother used to play at hide- 
and-seek in its forsaken precincts. So it had re- 
mained, until within a few days past. 

*'But now, though the shop-window was still 
closely curtained from the public gaze, a remark- 
able change had taken place in its interior. The 
rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost 
a long ancestral succession of spiders their life's 



110 HAWTHORNE 

labor to spin and weave, had been carefully brushed 
away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and 
floor had all been scoured, and the latter was over- 
strewn with fresh blue sand. The brown scales, 
too, had evidently undergone rigid discipline, in an 
unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas! 
had eaten through and through their substance. 
Neither was the little old shop any longer empty 
of merchantable goods. A curious eye, privileged 
to take an account of stock, and investigate behind 
the counter, would have discovered a barrel, — yea, 
two or three barrels and half ditto, — one containing 
flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps, Indian 
meal. There was likewise a square box of pine- 
wood, full of soap in bars; also, another of the 
same size, in which were tallow-candles, ten to the 
pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white 
beans and split peas, and a few other commodities 
of low price, and such as are constantly in demand, 
made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise. It 
might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasma- 
goric reflection of the old shop-keeper Pyncheon's 
shabbily provided shelves, save that some of the 
articles were of a description and outward form 
which could hardly have been known in his day. 
For instance, there was a glass pickle- jar filled with 
fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters 
of the veritable stone foundation of the famous 
fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly done 
up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, v/as seen 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 111 

executing his world-renowned dance, in ginger- 
bread. A party of leaden dragoons were galloping 
along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform 
of modern cut; and there were some sugar figures, 
with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any 
epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our 
own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. 
Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, 
was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old 
times, would have been thought actually to borrow 
their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of 
Tophet. 

"In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, 
it was incontrovertibly evident that somebody had 
taken the shop and fixtures of the long-retired and 
forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew 
the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a dif- 
ferent set of customers. Who could this bold ad- 
venturer be? And, of all places in the world, why 
had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as 
the scene of his commercial speculations? 

"We return to the elderly maiden. She at length 
withdrew her eyes from the dark countenance of 
the Colonel's portrait, heaved a sigh, — indeed, her 
breast was a very cave of ^olus that morning, — 
and stept across the room on tiptoe, as is the cus- 
tomary gait of elderly women. Passing through 
an intervening passage, she opened a door that com- 
municated with the shop, just now so elaborately 
described. Owing to the projection of the upper 



112 HAWTHORNE 

story — and still more to the thick shadow of the 
Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front 
of the gable — the twilight, here, was still as much 
akin to night as morning. Another heavy sigh from 
Miss Hepzibah! After a moment's pause on the 
threshold, peering towards the window with her 
near-sighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter 
enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop. 
The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of 
the movement, were really quite startling. 

'^Nervously — in a sort of frenzy, we might almost 
say — she began to busy herself in arranging some 
children's playthings, and other little wares, on the 
shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of 
this dark-arrayed, pale-faced, lady-like old figure 
there was a deeply tragic character that contrasted 
irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness of her 
employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so 
gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in 
hand; a miracle, that the toy did not vanish in her 
grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should 
go on perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with 
the question how to tempt little boys into her prem- 
ises! Yet such is undoubtedly her object. Now she 
places a gingerbread elephant against the window, 
but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon 
the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and 
its trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has 
become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, 
again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 113 

which roll different ways, and each individual mar- 
ble, devil-directed, into the most difficult obscurity 
that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzi- 
bah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of 
her position! As her rigid and rusty frame goes 
down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the ab- 
sconding marbles, we positively feel so much the 
more inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the 
very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh 
at her. For here, — and if we fail to impress it 
suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that 
of the theme, — here is one of the truest points of 
melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It 
was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. 
A lady — who had fed herself from childhood with 
the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and 
whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils itself 
irremediably by doing aught for bread — this born 
lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain 
to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. 
Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, 
has come up with her at last. She must earn her 
own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon 
Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the 
instant of time when the patrician lady is to be trans- 
formed into a plebeian woman. 

*Tn this republican country, amid the fluctuating 
waves of our social life, somebody is always at the 
drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted with as 
continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on 



114 HAWTHORNE 

a holiday; and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, per- 
haps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his 
order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the 
grosser substance of wealth and a splendid estab- 
lishment, and has no spiritual existence after the 
death of these, but dies hopelessly along with them. 
And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate 
enough to introduce our heroine at so inauspicious 
a juncture, we w^ould entreat for a mood of due 
solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us be- 
hold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial lady, — two 
hundred years old, on this side of the water, and 
thrice as many on the other, — with her antique por- 
traits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and tradi- 
tions, and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely 
territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness, 
but a populous fertility, — born, too, in Pyncheon 
Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyn- 
cheon House, where she has spent all her days, — 
reduced now, in that very house, to be the huck- 
steress of a cent-shop. 

"This business of setting up a petty shop is almost 
the only resource of w^omen, in circumstances at all 
similar to those of our unfortunate recluse. With 
her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of 
hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not 
be a seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years 
gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite speci- 
mens of ornamental needlework. A school for lit- 
tle children had been often in her thoughts; and, at 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 115 

one time, she had begun a review of her early 
studies in the New England Primer, with a view 
to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But 
the love of children had never quickened in Hepzi- 
bah's heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she 
watched the little people of the neighborhood from 
her chamber-window, and doubted whether she 
could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with 
them. Besides, in our day, the very ABC has be- 
come a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer 
taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A 
modern child could teach old Hepzibah more than 
old Hepzibah could teach the child. So — with many 
a cold, deep heart-quake at the idea of at last coming 
into sordid contact with the world, from which she 
had so long kept aloof, while every added day 
of seclusion had rolled another stone against the 
cavern-door of her hermitage — the poor thing be- 
thought herself of the ancient shop- window, the 
rusty scales, and dusty till. She might have held 
back a little longer; but another circumstance, not 
yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. 
Her humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, 
and the enterprise was now to be commenced. Nor 
was she entitled to complain of any remarkable sin- 
gularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, 
we might point to several little shops of a similar 
description, some of them in houses as ancient as 
that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may 
be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the 



116 HAWTHORNE 

counter, as grim an image of family pride as Miss 
Hepzibah Pyncheon herself. 

*'lt was overpoweringly ridiculous — we must hon- 
estly confess it — the deportment of the maiden lady 
while setting her shop in order for the public eye. 
She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if 
she conceived some bloody-minded villain to be 
watching behind the elm-tree, with intent to take 
her life. Stretching out her long, lank arm, she 
put a paper of pearl buttons, a jew's-harp, or what- 
ever the small article might be, in its destined place, 
and straightway vanished back into the dusk, as if 
the world need never hope for another glimpse of 
her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she 
expected to minister to the wants of the community 
unseen, like a disembodied divinity or enchantress, 
holding forth her bargains to the reverential and 
av^^e-stricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But 
Hepzibah had no such flattering dream. She was 
wdl aware that she must ultimately come forward, 
and stand revealed in her proper individuality ; but, 
like other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be 
observed in the gradual process, and chose rather to 
flash forth on the world's astonished gaze at once. 

"The inevitable moment was not much longer to 
be delayed. The sunshine might now be seen steal- 
ing down the front of the opposite house, from the 
windows of which came a reflected gleam, strug- 
gling through the boughs of the elm-tree, and en- 
lightening the interior of the shop more distinctly 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 117 

than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking 
up. A baker's cart had already rattled through the 
street, chasing away the latest vestige of night's 
sanctity with the jingle-jangle of its dissonant bells. 
A milkman was distributing the contents of his 
cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a 
fisherman's conch shell was heard far off, around 
the corner. None of these tokens escaped Hepzi- 
bah's notice. The moment had arrived. To delay 
longer w^ould be only to lengthen out her misery. 
Nothing remained, except to take down the bar from 
the shop-door, leaving the entrance free — more than 
free — welcome, as if all were household friends — 
to every passerby, whose eyes might be attracted 
by the commodities at the window. This last act 
Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with 
what smote upon her excited nerves as a most 
astounding clatter. Then — as if the only barrier 
betwixt herself and the world had been thrown 
down, and a flood of evil consequences would come 
tumbling through the gap — she fled into the inner 
parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair, 
and wept." 

Dear old Hepzibah! What loving kindness she 
had! It was likely to be a strange adventure for 
her; but she took the castaway of life into her boat, 
frail craft that it was, for the end of the voyage. 

The book is full of such realistic scenes minutely 
studied from the early years of the nineteenth cen- 



118 HAWTHORNE 

tury in the neighborhoods that Hawthorne knew. 
They give up their full local flavor, doubtless, only 
to those who can recall the marvelous views on old- 
fashioned wall-papers at Salem, the stately, white 
bannisters and paneled walls of the houses of that 
spacious era, just subsequent to the Revolution, the 
box-bordered walks of the trim back-gardens, the 
sunshine-flooded tulips, the scented breath of the 
spearmint patch! Provincial life, if it has, in the 
main, private delights and a charm incommunicable 
except to the native-born, owns also, since Theocri- 
tus, something of pastoral magic for all the world. 
The rural scene, the rustic tale are, perhaps, the com- 
moner and grosser forms in which the spell is woven 
in our generation, and especially the novel of the 
provinces, with a touch of dialect in speech as well 
as in manners, is to the fore ; but the magic needs no 
shepherd's tale nor idyllic poetry to find a home in 
the heart, for, after all, the best magic is unadulter- 
ated human nature, wherever f-ound. Dwellers in 
cities, too, and people in country houses have their 
chronicles, their *'life of the province," as many 
modern writers of fiction bear witness in all lan- 
guages. The type fascinates certain hearts in all 
lands; and in the streets of old Salem it found a 
wonderful soil, and a wonderful genius. 

The old town lives again in these pages, if indeed 
so feeble a flow may be called life. The anaemia of 
the book pervades it; for its points of crisis are the 
death-throes of the lives that are dying, the old 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 119 

curse wearing itself out; while the fresh lives, the 
new blood, in Phoebe, the niece, and her lover, the 
daguerreotypist, are used only as background and epi- 
sode. The most vital part is the reproduction of the 
general scene, the manners and customs, the little 
incidents, the way life went on. The first customer, 
a small fellow of the neighborhood, enters the shop, 
making the warning bell ring, with an effect of real, 
waking life, comparable only to the knocking at the 
gate in Macbeth. It is amazing, what a noise he 
makes! How he seems to set the world going! 
What boyhood memories he unlocks! Gibraltars 
and black-jacks! Those gingerbread elephants! 
Those lead soldiers ! Yet to what end is this inrush 
of youthful spirits, or of the more mature young 
womanhood and young manhood in the maiden 
sweetness of Phoebe and the democratic **newness" 
of the daguerreotypist? They may begin a new 
story, but they will never carry on the tale of the 
old house ; at the end of that tale, the old house will 
be dead, and every step is toward the catastrophe. 
It is as if one were witnessing an execution. 
It is this temperament of the book, this atmosphere 
pervading it, this irremediableness in misery, after 
all, however caused, that imbues it with somber- 
ness. It is only in this impression that the fatal ele- 
ment in the curse is truly felt. Though one disbe- 
lieves in the reality of the curse, he can not 
altogether escape from it in the imagination. 
There are ghosts in the old house, whatever one be- 



120 HAWTHORNE 

lieves. The voices of the lovers, the call-bell of the 
little boy, Uncle Venner's fish-horn do not drive 
them away; and, meanwhile, as it were in their 
presence, the old-time village life goes on. Hepzi- 
bah gets the breakfast of broiled mackerel, and 
Clifford, "the guest," descends the stairs to his first 
meal "at home," as if there were no ghosts there, 
barkening in the corners and peering from the old 
Colonel's portrait. 

"Hepzibah's small and ancient table, supported on 
its slender and graceful legs, and covered with a 
cloth of the richest damask, looked worthy to be 
the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of 
parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like in- 
cense from the shrine of a barbarian idol, while the 
fragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the 
nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or w^iatever power has 
scope over a modern breakfast-table. Phoebe's In- 
dian cakes were the sweetest offering of all, — in 
their hue befitting the rustic altars of the innocent 
and golden age, — or, so brightly yellow were they, 
resembling some of the bread which was changed 
to glistening gold w^hen Midas tried to eat it. The 
butter must not be forgotten, — butter which Phoebe 
herself had churned, in her own rural home, and 
brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory gift, — 
smelling of clover-blossoms, and diffusing the 
charm of pastoral scenery through the dark-pan- 
elled parlor. All this, with the quaint gorgeousness 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 121 

of the old china cups and saucers, and the crested 
spoons, and a silver cream- jug (Hepzibah's only 
other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest 
porringer), set out a board at which the stateliest 
of old Colonel Pyncheon's guests need not have 
scorned to take his place. But the Puritan's face 
scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on 
the table pleased his appetite. 



" 'Hush !' whispered Hepzibah. *Be cheerful ! 
whatever may happen, be nothing but cheerful !' 

''The final pause at the threshold proved so long, 
that Hepzibah, unable to endure the suspense, 
rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in 
the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, 
Phoebe saw an elderly personage, in an old-fash- 
ioned dressing-gown, of faded damask, and wearing 
his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. 
It quite overshadowed his forehead, except when 
he thrust it back, and stared vaguely about the room. 
After a very brief inspection of his face, it was 
easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily 
be such an one as that which, slowly, and with as 
indefinite an aim as a child's first journey across a 
floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there 
were no tokens that his physical strength might not 
have sufficed for a free and determined gait. It 
was the spirit of the man that could not walk. The 
expression of his countenance — while, notwithstand^ 



122 HAWTHORNE 

ing, it had the hght of reason in it — seemed to 
waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away, and 
feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame 
which we see twinkling among half -extinguished 
embers; we gaze at it more intently than if it were 
a positive blaze, gushing vividly upward, — more in- 
tently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought 
either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or 
be at once extinguished. 

"For an instant after entering the room, the guest 
stood still, retaining Hepzibah's hand, instinctively, 
as a child does that of the grown person who guides 
it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an illum- 
ination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, 
which, indeed, threw a cheerfulness about the par- 
lor, like the circle of reflected brilliancy around the 
glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sun- 
shine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer 
the truth, an ill-defined, abortive attempt at cour- 
tesy. Imperfect as it was, however, it conveyed an 
idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, 
such as no practised art of external manners could 
have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the 
instant; yet, as recollected afterwards, seemed to 
transfigure the whole man. 

" 'Dear Clifford,' said Hepzibah, in the tone with 
which one soothes a wayward infant, 'this is our 
cousin Phoebe, — little Phoebe Pyncheon, — Arthur's 
only child, you know. She has come from the 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 123 

country to stay with us awhile; for our old house 
has grown to be very lonely now/ 

" Thcebe ? — Phoebe Pyncheon ? — Phoebe ?' re- 
peated the guest, with a strange sluggish, ill-defined 
utterance. 'Arthur's child! Ah, I forget! No 
matter ! She is very welcome !' . . . 

"At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still 
imperfect animation, Phoebe became convinced of 
what she had at first rejected as too extravagant 
and startling an idea. She saw that the person 
before her must have been the original of the beau- 
tiful miniature in her cousin Hepzibah's possession. 
Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she had 
at once identified the damask dressing-gown, which 
enveloped him, as the same in figure, material, and 
fashion, with that so elaborately represented in the 
picture. This old, faded garment, w^ith all its pris- 
tine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescrib- 
able way, to translate the wearer's untold misfor- 
tune, and make it perceptible to the beholder's eye. 
It w^as the better to be discerned, by this exterior 
type, how worn and old were the soul's more imme- 
diate garments; that form and countenance, the 
beauty and grace of which had almost transcended 
the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It could 
the more adequately be known that the soul of the 
man must have suffered some miserable wrong, 
from its earthly experience. There he seemed to 
sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him 



124 HAWTHORNE 

and the world, but through which, at flitting inter- 
vals, might be caught the same expression, so re- 
fined, so softly imaginative, which Malbone — ven- 
turing a happy touch, with suspended breath — had 
imparted to the miniature ! There had been some- 
thing so innately characteristic in this look, that all 
the dusky years, and the burden of unfit calamity 
which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly 
to destroy it." 

Hepzibah embodies one phase of the tragedy of 
women's lives in old New England; and, apart from 
the special circumstances of her lot, she typifies a 
class. Other later writers have attempted to por- 
tray it; but she stands unrivaled, the protagonist of 
all her kind. Clifford, her counterpart, is presented 
in a different vein of pathos; and in him, particu- 
larly, is seen an example of Hawthorne's preoccupa- 
tion with artistic themes and the analysis of the 
artistic nature, of the sort that has been already al- 
luded to. The use of the miniature by Malbone, 
in the last citation, is an instance of Hawthorne's 
employment of properties of the kind; here it serves 
as a minor echo of the old Colonel's portrait, which 
is, of course, primary in the decorative scheme, if 
one may use such a phrase without giving too much 
sense of design. The general purpose is to develop 
and unveil with an almost imperceptible increment 
and fulness the esthetic side of Clifford's now 
broken nature. With what slow approaches Haw- 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 125 

thorne places him in the presence of simple objects 
of beauty and shows his feeble responses, as if by 
brief flashes of a rallying mind! The whole scene 
is against the background of the old prison-life; the 
age and grim scowl of Hepzibah are used for con- 
trast, the youth of Phoebe concentrates the elements 
of charm, the physical coarsening of Clifford's na- 
ture by his privations gives deep-cut shadows; at 
last the scene is focused in the flower, itself a kind 
of replica of the young girl in her maidenhood and 
a symbol of the fresh bud putting forth on the old 
branch of the decaying house. But let the romancer, 
himself, speak! — 

"Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed 
Clifford's nature to be a Sybarite. It was percept- 
ible, even there, in the dark old parlor, in the in- 
evitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted 
towards the quivering play of sunbeams through 
the shadowy foliage. It was seen in his appreciat- 
ing notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of which 
he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical 
organization so refined that spiritual ingredients are 
moulded in with it. It was betrayed in the uncon- 
scious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose 
fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and 
flowers, — their essence, in a prettier and more 
agreeable mode of manifestation. Not less evident 
was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the 
instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his 



I 

126 • HAWTHORNE 

eyes 'turned away from his hostess, and wandered 
to any quarter rather than come back. It was Hep- 
zibah's misfortune, — not CHfford's fault. How 
could he, — so yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so 
sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a turban 
on her head, and that most perverse of scowls con- 
torting her brow, — how could he love to gaze at 
her ? But, did he owe her no affection for so much 
as she had silently given? He owed her nothing. 
A nature like Clifford's can contract no debts of 
that kind. It is — we say it without censure, nor in 
diminution of the claim which it inde feasibly pos- 
sesses on beings of another mould — it is always 
selfish in its essence; and we must give it leave 
to be so, and heap up our heroic and disinter- 
ested love upon it so much the more, without a 
recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, 
at least, acted on the instinct of it. So long es- 
tranged fro;n what was lovely as Clifford had been, 
she rejoiced — rejoiced, though with a present sigh, 
and a secret purpose to shed tears in her own cham- 
ber — that he had brighter objects now before his 
eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They 
never possessed a charm; and if they had, the can- 
ker of her grief for him would long since have de- 
stroyed it. 

*'The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in 
his countenance with a dreamy delight, there was a 
troubled look of effort and unrest. He was seeking 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 127 

to make himself more fully sensible of the scene 
around him ; or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, 
or a play of imagination, was vexing the fair mo- 
ment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and 
more durable illusion. 

" 'Hov/ pleasant ! — How delightful !' he mur- 
mured, but not as if addressing any one. 'Will it 
last? How balmy the atmosphere through that 
open window! An open window! How beautiful 
that play of sunshine! Those flowers, how very 
fragrant! That young girl's face, how cheerful, 
how blooming! — a flower with the dew on it, and 
sunbeams in the dew-drops ! Ah ! this must be all 
a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite 
hidden the four stone walls !' 

''Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a 
cavern or a dungeon had come over it ; there was no 
more light in its expression than might have come 
through the iron grates of a prison window, — still 
lessening, too, as if he were sinking farther into 
the depths. Phoebe (being of that quickness and 
activity of temperament that she seldom long re- 
frained from taking a part, and generally a good 
one, in what was going forward) now felt herself 
moved to address the stranger. 

" 'Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this 
morning in the garden,' said she, choosing a small 
crimson one from among the flowers in the vase. 
'There will be but five or six on the bush this sea- 



128 HAWTHORNE 

son. This is the most perfect of them all; not a 
speck of blight or mildew in it. And how sweet it 
is ! — sweet like no other rose ! One can never for- 
get that scent !' 

" *Ah ! — let me see ! — let me hold it !' cried the 
guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which, by the spell 
peculiar to remembered odors, brought innumerable 
associations along with the fragrance that it ex- 
haled. *Thank you ! This has done me good. I re- 
member how I used to prize this flower, — long ago, 
I suppose, very long ago ! — or was it only yester- 
day ? It makes me feel young again ! Am I young ? 
Either this remembrance is singularly distinct, or 
this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind 
of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you!' " 

But, it is time to draw the curtain : 

"A slumberous veil diffused itself over his coun- 
tenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on its 
naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that 
which a brooding mist, with no sunshine in it, 
throws over the features of a landscape. He ap- 
peared to become grosser, — almost cloddish. If 
aught of interest or beauty — even ruined beauty — 
had heretofore been visible in this man, the be- 
holder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse 
his own imagination of deluding him with whatever 
grace had flickered over that visage, and whatever 
exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes. 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 129 

"Finally, his chair being deep and softly cush- 
ioned, Clifford fell asleep. Hearing the more regu- 
lar rise and fall of his breath (which, however, even 
then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble 
kind of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor 
in his character), — hearing these tokens of settled 
slumber, Hepzibah seized the opportunity to peruse 
his face more attentively than she had yet dared to 
do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profound- 
est spirit sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, 
but inexpressibly sad. In this depth of grief and 
pity she felt that there was no irreverence in gazing 
at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no 
sooner w^as she a little relieved than her conscience 
smote her for gazing curiously at him, now that he 
was so changed ; and, turning hastily away, Hepzi- 
bah let down the curtain over the sunny window, 
and left Clifford to slumber there.'* 

Feeble as the life is in the old house, wdiatever 
comes near it and most pertains to it lives most. 
The outlying parts of the story, the subordinate in- 
terests, are less vital. The idyl of Phoebe and the 
young daguerreotypist fades away with their youth- 
ful talk of the new age. The heavy tragedy of the 
villain's taking off by apoplexy, though it is the 
climax of the plot, notwithstanding the elal^orate 
narrative, remains only an episode; the house-in- 
terior and the wandering figures flitting there hold 
the center of the stage. The fatuity of the lives of 



130 HAWTHORNE 

Hepzlbah and Clifford reaches its climax, when 
their courage fails them in the attempt to go to 
church : 

" 'Were I to be there/ he rejoined, 'it seems to 
me that I could pray once more, when so many 
human souls were praying all around me !' 

"She looked into Clifford's face, and beheld there 
a soft natural effusion; for his heart gushed out, 
as it were, and ran over at his eyes, in delightful 
reverence for God, and kindly affection for his 
human brethren. The emotion communicated itself 
to Hepzibah. She yearned to take him by the hand, 
and go and kneel down, they two together, — both so 
long separate from the world, and, as she now rec- 
ognized, scarcely friends with Him above, — to kneel 
down among the people, and be reconciled to God 
and man at once. 

" 'Dear brother,' said she, earnestly, 'let us go ! 
We belong nowhere. We have not a foot of space 
in any church to kneel upon ; but let us go to some 
place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. 
Poor and forsaken as we are, some pew-door will 
be opened to us !' 

"So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves 
ready, — as ready as they could in the best of their 
old-fashioned garments, which had hung on pegs, or 
been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness 
and mouldy smell of the past was on them, — made 
themselves ready, in their faded bettermost, to go to 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 131 

church. They descended the staircase together, — 
gaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, age- 
stricken Clifford ! They pulled open the front door, 
and stepped across the threshold, and felt, both of 
them, as if they were standing in the presence of the 
whole world, and with mankind's great and terrible 
eye on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed 
to be withdrawn, and gave them no encouragement. 
The warm sunny air of the street made them shiver. 
Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of tak- 
ing one step farther. 

" Tt can not be, Hepzibah ! — It Is too late,' said 
Clifford, with deep sadness. 'We are ghosts! We 
have no right among human beings, — no right any- 
where but in this old house, which has a curse on it, 
and which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! 
And, besides,' he continued, with a fastidious sensi- 
bility, inalienably characteristic of the man, 'it 
would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly 
thought that I should be frightful to my fellow-be- 
ings, and that children would cling to their mothers' 
gowns at sight of me !' 

"They shrank back Into the dusky passage-way, 
and closed the door. But, going up the staircase again, 
they found the whole Interior of the house tenfold 
more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the 
glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just 
snatched. They could not flee ; their jailer had but 
left the door ajar in mockery, and stood behind it 
to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they 



132 HAWTHORNE 

felt his pitiless gripe upon them. For, what other 
dungeon is so dark as one's own heart ! What jailer 
so inexorable as one's self!" 

What is there left to them but flight from the 
place of their abandonment by man and God? 

What does it matter that it all ended at last, as 
stories will, happily, in a clarification of incident, 
in sunshine and gold, a retreat for old Uncle Ven- 
ner and an open door to the future for Phoebe and 
her lover ! Stories will end so. But the real story, 
the genealogical story, the story of the curse, — did 
Hawthorne believe it at all ? — did he believe in some 
unescapable moral inheritance, a mystery of fate, — 
or did he merely embroider on the groundwork of 
old fancies, the village and landscape scenes of his 
youth ? 

However that may be, it is for the portrayal 
of old Salem that one reads the tale. It was this 
"old Salem," and not his contemporary abiding- 
place, to which Hawthorne felt the ancestral cling 
which he defined as *'not love, but instinct." He 
recalls, in another place, the grounds for this, — the 
succession of his forefathers in the old colony from 
its first planting, and especially the hundred-year 
line of ship-masters, the boy of fourteen succeeding 
the gray-head in each generation, as he ''took his 
hereditary place before the mast, confronting the 
salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against 
his sire and grandsire"; ^nd he declares the native 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 133 

hold on the heart of a soil that is through long time 
the family place of birth and burial. Then he speaks 
as a son of the soil. "It is no matter that the place 
is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old 
wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level 
of site and sentiment, the chill east-wind, and the 
chillest of social atmospheres; all these, and what- 
ever faults besides he may see or imagine, are noth- 
ing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as 
powerfully as if the natal spot had been an earthly 
paradise. So has it been in my case." He owns to 
feeling that he has disappointed his worthy fore- 
bears. "No aim, that I have ever cherished, would 
they recognize as laudable; no success of mine — if 
my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever l^een 
brightened by success — would they deem otherwise 
than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. . . 
And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong 
traits of their nature have intertwined themselves 
with mine." It was unfortunate that a man, destined 
to recreate the life of his native place through long 
stages of history should have felt such a cleavage 
with the very theme of his tale. This cleavage, how- 
ever, was felt quite as keenly on the other side. 
Salem was not, at the time, nor has it been, very 
friendly to her great citizen. Tlie charm of Haw- 
thorne's sketches of the old village and town life 
did not quickly dissipate the indifferent or adverse 
atmosphere of his contemporary days, nor did his 
fame waft it away in the next generation. But, 



134 HAWTHORNE 

happily, the creations of the imagination free them- 
selves from prejudice, ill-feeling, and personality, 
and live in a larger world than the village of their 
birth. 

It should be borne in mind, too, in connection 
v^ith this phase of Hawthorne's life that his griev- 
ance, if it may be called such, was almost as much 
against the Avorld as against Salem. Salem was only 
the spot where he felt the rub of the world most. 
Embitterment is plain in the words he came to write 
finally of the place of his nativity and his fellow- 
citizens; but, probably, it was the condition of the 
literary life that was, after all, most to blame. He 
had to earn his bread by other means than his crea- 
tive talent, and it is not surprising that there was 
friction of one kind and another. The truth is that, 
probably, it was by the merest accident of his having 
gone to college wuth classmates afterwards of 
great political power, that his career escaped a tragic 
ending, such as is frequent in literary annals. It 
was due, perhaps, to his prolonged trials, as an au- 
thor, that a certain self-distrust, which amounted to 
a distrust of his genius, was, seemingly, developed 
in him. At all events, a chasm opened between him 
and life, in many directions, as his literary career 
developed. He notices, himself, the unreality that 
comes upon all things to the solitary dreamer, if 
the mood be too long protracted. His lack of inti- 
macy with intellectual equals, unless Ellery Chan- 
ning be reckoned as an exception, is noticeable. He 



THE COLONIAL TRADITION 135 

seems to have belonged to those hterary men who 
find companionship outside the Hmits of the craft, 
and have thus broader sympathies with hfe. He 
was, in such w^ays, of a larger nature than his fel- 
low-authors, as has been said, and had something 
of Scott's "saving commonsense" in respect to his 
art. 

Thus, from one point of view and another, it 
would appear that Hawthorne was characterized by 
his genius and isolated by it, and saw the world 
at Salem and was seen by it as the w^orld would 
have seen him and been seen by him anywhere. The 
situation was merely a local case of the "prophet 
without honor in his own country.'* The years pass, 
and the statue rises. This is the outward and vis- 
ible sign of his acceptance by his people, where the 
"House of the Seven Gables" is a shrine of local 
pilgrimage. 



CHAPTER V 

THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 

THE first generation of New England writers 
of distinction fell heir to a common stock of 
communal beliefs and memories, which was the 
parent soil of their works, however diverse. Their 
attitude toward this body of tradition discriminates 
the varieties of their genius. Emerson, the most 
purely spiritual among them, and ardent to advance 
still further the light which had long burned in the 
hearts of the men of that lonely wilderness, was de- 
structive of the past, a foremost radical. Longfel- 
low, with the instinct and training of a scholar, and 
being, besides, a poet, was preservative of this tra- 
dition, a continuer of its finer legends and aspira- 
tions in tale and history. Hawthorne was the pure 
artist, who, indeed, reflected the moral sky of that 
old heaven under which he was born and grew into 
his own somber manhood, but, nevertheless, handled 
tradition with a predominantly artistic instinct and 
feeling for objective effect, harmonious arrange- 
ment, and unity of expression through all modula- 
tions of contrast, episode and decoration. He was 
not much interested in other things, such as reform, 
except superficially; he minded, principally, his tale, 

136 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 137 

and if he is deeply affected by the moral significance 
of what he tells, it is because that is the core of the 
tale as he penetrates into its meaning. If Emerson 
was destructive and Longfellow preservative of tra- 
dition, Hawthorne is best described as penetrating 
its moral substance. 

He was, by nature, of a brooding temperament, 
being the child of a sea- faring race, and born in a 
community much given to meditation, with a vigor- 
ous intellectual vein in it, the result in part of its 
isolation and concentration of thought on religious 
themes. It is true his environment in his own youth 
and manhood was little favorable to genius. His 
life was in small communities, where his contact 
with men and affairs was at times slight, at times 
humdrum, and never very stimulating, it would 
seem, even at Concord, then the Mecca of intellect 
in New England. His mental food in those days 
was but a meager diet of experience, as he strolled 
through country lanes, and his writing, as has been 
observed, was apt to take the form of notes on vege- 
tables, the look of trees in autumn, the behavior of 
sea-gulls and plover on the beach. But as he 
worked into his life, as even genius will, with a cer- 
tain earnest intuition and sounding of the meaning, 
while one scene and another passed before him sub- 
stantially or in fancy, he found that for him, at 
least, whatever the aspect of things might be within 
the narrow limits of experience assigned to him or 
others, the essential thing was moral, — that was the 



138 HAWTHORNE 

meaning at the core of all things; however trivial 
the scene might be, however lonely its small theater, 
he discerned the nobility of his material by virtue of 
its moral nature. One prime requirement of great 
art, — that it should deal with noble material, — was 
met in his instinctive moral view of life; here was 
his pathway to universal interest, the chance to 
make his humble treasures current in a greater 
world than that from which they were derived, to 
lift his thoughts into the general mind of man and 
disseminate them there, if only he had the art, un- 
der the inspiration, of his genius, to deal worthily 
with the material at his hand. 

Hawthorne had labored long at the short story, 
before he produced the greater work of a novel. 
It is said, indeed, that he first conceived The Scar- 
let Letter as a brief tale of the colonies, such as 
he told many a time. It is natural, in any case, to 
find the novel cast in the lines of a tale, that being 
the well-formed habit of his mind. From this early 
prepossession of his mind by the methods of short- 
story writing, doubtless, proceeded the trait that 
continued to characterize him, of employing only a 
few characters, supported by the most obvious and 
simple accessories in the way of setting and environ- 
ment, all of which should throw their light upon the 
central figures. It was also natural that meditation, 
thought about what was going on, should be to the 
fore, as it had been in the allegorizing tales of his 
earlier years. Meditation, indeed, — the author's 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 139 

comment, — is an unusually large element in Haw- 
thorne's way of presenting his theme. That, in 
fact, was always substantially an idea; and medita- 
tion, in the shape of the author's comment was the 
natural method of developing it, — the end of the 
tale being not an event, or any phase of action, for 
itself, but a conviction in the reader's mind. The prin- 
ciple of artistic economy is rigidly observed by him 
in the novel as it had been in the tale; the fewest 
characters and simple events, necessary to sl<:eleton- 
ize the story and clothe it in time and place, in the 
colors of mortality, are the sole means sought to set 
forth the moral truth, which blazes in the garb of 
art from the climax. The moral truth set forth is 
not didactic; it is vital, and shown, whether in 
events or scenes, corporeally as a picture. Thus the 
last sentence of The Scarlet Letter is not a 
maxim, but presents a tombstone as a summary, 
compressing in itself the tale pictorially, itself the 
graven symbol of a symbol : — "It bore a device, a 
herald's wording of which might serve for a motto 
and brief description of our now completed legend; 
so somber is it, and relieved only by one ever- 
glowing point of light, gloomier than the shadow : 

ON A FIELD SABLE, THE LETTER A. GULES." 

The scene of the romance, as presented in the 
book, has one quality characteristic of the highest 
creative art. It is perfectly isolated; Prospero's 
enchanted isle is not more sundered from the com- 
mon world. The lonely New England wilderness, 



140 HAWTHORNE 

apart from its being Puritan, offered a fit stage for 
a concentrated imaginative tale, complete within 
itself. Although historic, by its distance in time 
and sentiment, it seems another soil than ours. 
Hawthorne intended to use but few characters in 
the tale; but, for all that, its meaning was general 
and its theme universal, and by the very nature of 
its thought, which involved publicity as an essential 
element, the tale required a social environment in 
which to develop; especially was this the case be- 
cause it was to be, substantially, a communal tale, 
not one of individuals, primarily. He folded the 
little world of the interior drama, therefore, be- 
tween the two great communal scenes, at the begin- 
ning and the end, each important and imposing in 
village life, as one may style it, — the public execu- 
tion of the sentence of the magistrates, on one hand, 
and the holiday of the election sermon on the other. 
Except in these instances the general life touches 
the story only incidentally and vaguely. It is some- 
what thus that the Midsummer Night's Dream, 
in Shakespeare, is isolated between the scenes of 
Theseus' court. The environing Puritan world, in 
general, in Hawthorne's tale, is felt by the public 
acts of condemnation and exhortation; but it is 
rendered only by slight and general touches, as re- 
gards persons. It serves to introduce the figures of 
the two male characters, and to give a guise of for- 
mality to the town's officials; but, in the main, a? 
environment, that world is a characteristic crowd, 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 141 

like one of Shakespeare's mobs, picturesque with the 
wild Indian guide on the outskirts, or the Spanish 
sailors with the brooch of gold in their belts, and 
vocal with the miscellaneous voices of hard or gen- 
tle women. The early stage scenery is slight, — a 
village street, a prison, a scaffold and a church ; and 
the same simplicity is observed in the later stage- 
settings, such as the Governor's house or the forest 
brook-side. The background and accessories are 
thus sketched in, after the visual impression and 
general sentiment of the community have been 
given, but with a sparing hand. The interior drama 
of the main persons becomes quickly the center of 
interest, like a play within a play, with only an oc- 
casional local touch to hint a larger world, such as 
a word on witchcraft in the forest or a glance at 
some embroidered sleeve of that age of needle- 
work ; and, in particular, the light beats with an ever 
intenser ray on the Scarlet Letter. 

The fantastical gold-embroidered letter itself on 
Hester Prynne's bosom, as it takes the sunlight on 
her emergence from the prison-door, marks the 
climax of Hawthorne's use of the physical image 
to concentrate and express the idea. In accordance 
with his practise the action before and after the 
play of events he presents is veiled; the drama be- 
gins and at last ends at the scaffold. The lack of 
interest in persons thus evidenced is obvious. The 
neglect of adventure, passion, intrigue, the ways 
and means of life, of the character and circumstance 



142 HAWTHORNE 

out of which the drama arose, is as complete as pos- 
sible; only so much is told as to furnish information 
necessary to the understanding of the situation. The 
abstract element in Hawthorne's art throws its 
shadow before, from the rise of the curtain. The 
Scarlet Letter, on its appearance, is almost an alge- 
braic sign. It signifies a state of affairs, but no 
particular facts or situations beforehand, no human 
story of love or infatuation; it stands as if some- 
thing given by hypothesis. What truth will follow 
therefrom is independent of time, place or person. 
The tale is of men's bosoms from the beginning; 
it is of secret things and therefore not primarily 
of observation, but of imagination. In this romance 
imagination is the eye of the soul to which alone it 
gives up its profound secrets. Historic fact and 
description, indeed, there are besides; but the heart 
of the story is in the gaze of the imagination on the 
bosoms of the three, Hester, her lover and her hus- 
band, so fatally linked. The tale is not of the pas- 
sion or the sin; that chapter is closed. It is of pun- 
ishment solely; and it starts, naturally, from the 
simple and obvious punishment, a lifelong badge 
of shame to be worn by the woman. 

The handling of the physical image to give it 
growth and range of power and load it with blast- 
ing influence on these unhappy lives offers some 
novel traits. Repetition and reduplication are cus- 
tomary methods of concentration of interest and 
development of meaning. In the tale of "The 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 143 

Artist of the Beautiful," the physical image of the 
butterfly was destroyed more than once, but it re- 
appeared from its fragments with increasing signifi- 
cance. The physical image of the Scarlet Letter is 
never destroyed, but it is repeated in other forms 
and persons, and, curiously enough, it is given a sort 
of life of its own which grows like an evil and be- 
witched thing. The tendency of the image to 
achieve physical identity with the person involved, 
in Hawthorne's short stories, has been pointed out 
in the case of *The Birthmark," and, especially in 
that of the poison-flower of ^'Rappacinni's Daugh- 
ter." There it was a striking in of the image. The 
Scarlet Letter, however, has its origin in the soul, 
and proceeds outwardly to become an external 
stigma. Whether by public enactment, as in Hes- 
ter's case, or by a secret physiological change in the 
minister's bosom — whatever be the particular mode 
employed — the essential thing is to secure practical 
union of the image and the idea, so far as their 
significance is concerned. To employ the human 
body, however, as the means of that union is dis- 
tinctly a Hawthornesque trait, and is, no doubt, 
related to the speculation of his time as to the in- 
fluence of the mind on the body, or of spirit on 
matter. It is, partly, by this device that he gives a 
quasi-life to the letter, an evil growth. Something 
in his method, here, is also due to the fact that the 
true action, the spiritual action, is a thing of the 
unseen sphere of the soul, and goes on in secret 



144 HAWTHORNE 

within the breast. It is less a developing action 
than a changing state. It can be observed only 
by signs and indications, indirectly; and, however 
the eye of the imagination penetrates the soul's 
sphere, it can tell what it sees only by material 
images. It is for this reason that, in default of 
other means, Hawthorne is really driven to express 
the progress of his story by presenting it as typi- 
fied in the physique of the persons, in the minister 
and physician, and in the material accouterment 
and happenings of the scene, in the case of Hester. 
It is essential to remember, in approaching the 
tale, that it is not a history of the sin, but of the 
punishment. This accounts for the fact that Hes- 
ter's thoughts are centered on the badge ; very little 
is said of what the great passion of life meant to 
her in retrospect. At the very beginning the Scar- 
let Letter is made to characterize her : 

"On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, 
surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fan- 
tastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter 
A. It was so artistically done and with so much 
fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it 
had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to 
the apparel which she wore; and which was of a 
splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, 
but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sump- 
tuary regulations of the colony. . . . She had 
in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental character- 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 145 

istic, a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, 

save in the exquisite productions of her needle, 

found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her 
life to exercise itself on." 

The continued use by Hawthorne of this skill in 
needlework which Hester had, is an example of his 
own decorative instinct as a writer, and the delicate 
artistic tastes that are so frequently to be observed 
in his works. Needlework and works of charity 
became Hester's normal human life in the com- 
munity; but she lived, nevertheless, in complete iso- 
lation because of the letter, which was a Pariah 
mark. Yet not wholly in isolation ; there were ave- 
nues of thought that led straight to the breasts of 
others. Her eyes had been rubbed with an all-see- 
ing ointment. 

"Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, 
had she been of a softer moral and intellectual fibre, 
would have been still more so, by the strange and sol- 
itary anguish of her life. Walking to and fro, with 
those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which 
she was outwardly connected, it now and then ap- 
peared to Hester, — if altogether fancy, it was nev- 
ertheless too potent to be resisted, — she felt or fan- 
cied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her 
with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet 
could not help believing, that it gave her a sympa- 
thetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. 



146 HAWTHORNE 

She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were 
thus made. What were they ? Could they be other 
than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who 
would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, 
as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of 
purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were every- 
where to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth 
on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or, 
must she receive those intimations — so obscure, yet 
so distinct — as truth? In all her miserable experi- 
ence, there was nothing else so awful and so loath- 
some as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked 
her, by the irreverent ihopportuneness of the occa- 
sions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes 
the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympa- 
thetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister 
or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to 
whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to 
a mortal man in fellowship with angels. What 
evil thing is at hand?' would Hester say to herself. 
Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing 
human within the scope of view, save the form of 
this earthly saint ! Again, a mystic sisterhood would 
contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sancti- 
fied frown of some matron, who, according to the 
rumor of all tongues, had kept cold snow within 
her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow 
in the matron's bosom, and the burning shame on 
Hester Prynne's, — what had the two in common? 
Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 147 

earning— ^Behold, Hester, here is a companion T 
—and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a 
young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly 
and aside, and quickly averted with a faint, chill 
crimson in her cheeks; as if her purity were some- 
what sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, 
whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou 
leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor 
sinner to revere?— such loss of faith is ever one of 
the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof 
that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her 
own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester 
Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mor- 
tal was guilty like herself." 

The second phase of the letter is its rebirth, as it 
were, in Pearl, the child. This is the least convinc- 
ing form that the phantasm, to style it so, takes. In 
spite of Hawthorne's skill in handling childish 
scenes with charm and tenderness, and a certain 
gaiety of spirits. Pearl is hardly subdued to his 
magic; she seems always to be in the scene for a 
purpose, and this is in itself inharmonious with nat- 
ural childhood, while, besides, there is an essential 
conflict between childish innocence and the significa- 
tion of the letter, which is felt as a perpetual dis- 
cord, when the two are brought closely together and 
their union so tirelessly insisted on, as in the tale. 
In a certain sense, it is not too much to say that 
Pearl is used to torture her mother with refinements 



148 HAWTHORNE 

of pain ingeniously thought out and contrived by 
the author. Hawthorne not infrequently seems to 
"manage" his characters, as the phrase goes; no- 
where else does he give this impression so clearly 
as in depicting little Pearl. She takes up the Scar- 
let Letter, like an echo that keeps on reechoing 
through the landscape in multiform and unexpected 
voices and images. In initiating this new strain of 
Pearl's childhood, in the history of the letter, the 
connection with the theme is easily made through 
Hesters skill in needlework, and delight in its exer- 
cise that has already been emphasized. Pearl's pe- 
culiar kind of beauty, indeed, seems to call for just 
this high decorative touch, which makes her like an 
exotic flower in the gray Puritan town; she, with 
her elf-like life and brilliant color, seems, no less 
than her mother, alien to the life in the midst of 
which she is found. And when she appeared, the 
little visitant might indeed have seemed a fairy 
masker from old court revelries. 

''Her mother, in contriving the child's garb, had 
allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination 
their full play; arraying her in a crimson velvet 
tunic, of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered 
with fantasies and flourishes of gold-thread. So 
much strength of coloring, which must have given a 
wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, 
was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 149 

her the very brightest Httle jet of flame that ever 
danced upon the earth. 

"But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, 
and, indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it 
irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of 
the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear 
upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in an- 
other form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! 
The mother herself — as if the red ignominy were 
so deeply scorched into her brain that all her con- 
ceptions assumed its form — had carefully wrought 
out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid 
ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object 
of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and 
torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one, as well 
as the other; and only in consequence of that iden- 
tity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent 
the scarlet letter in her appearance. 



" *What have we here ?' said Governor Belling- 
ham, looking with surprise at the scarlet little fig- 
ure before him. T profess, I have never seen the 
like, since my days of vanity, in old King James's 
time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favor to 
be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a 
swarm of these small apparitions, in holiday time; 
and we called them children of the Lord of Mis- 
rule. But how gat such a guest into my hall ?' 



150 HAWTHORNE 

" 'Ay, indeed !' cried good old Mr. Wilson. *What 
little bird of scarlet plumage may this be? Me- 
thinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun 
has been shining through a richly painted window, 
and tracing out the golden and crimson images 
across the floor. But that was in the old land. 
Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what hast 
ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange fash- 
ion ? Art thou a Christian child, — ha ? Dost know 
thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty 
elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left be- 
hind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry old 
England ?' 

" *I am mother's child/ answered the scarlet vi- 
sion, 'and my name is Pearl !' '* 

The scene by the brook-side, at a later moment, 
between Pearl, her mother and the minister, brings 
her into a new contact with the letter, while it hap- 
pily varies the decorative quality of the childish fig- 
ure. Hawthorne's fondness for mirrored effects is 
noticeable in the child's image in the brook. The 
heart of the scene, however, lies in Pearl's refusal to 
recognize her mother without the Scarlet Letter, just 
torn from her breast and cast aside. The letter has 
become embodied in Hester, so that she was not 
recognizable to her child without it. Hawthorne 
passes the matter off as a childish whim; but his 
meaning is evidently deeper than w^him. It may 
-seem like refining too much to refine so, but what 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 151 

really is set forth here Is the growtli of the letter, 
spreading out and entering more deeply in, until it 
absorbs these lives, like an evil monster. Hester is 
subject to it; at her child's will, she puts it on again; 
it began its career on her solitary breast, and grad- 
ually, identifying itself with her life and shadowing 
the world about her, it sprang to another life in 
Pearl, and it will continue to break out in new 
forms. The cling of the letter to the mind and 
body of both mother and child is as close as fate, 
and it seems impossible that they should ever be 
freed from it; but the evil thing, in w^hich there is 
much of Puritan pitilessness, is managed with much 
prettiness in the woodland scenes by the sunshiny 
brook, — scenes that Hawthorne knew well how to 
paint. How tranquil it all is ! — 

"By this time Pearl had reached the margin of 
the brook, and stood on the farther side, gazing 
silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat 
together on the mossy tree-trunk, waiting to receive 
her. Just where she had paused, the brook chanced 
to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected 
a perfect image of her little figure, with all the bril- 
liant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment 
of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined 
and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so 
nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to 
communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and 
intangible quality to the child herself. It was 



152 HAWTHORNE 

strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so 
steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the 
forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with 
a ray of sunshine that was attracted thitherward 
as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath 
stood another child, — another and the same, — with 
likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, 
in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged 
from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble 
through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere 
in which she and her mother dwelt together, and 
was now vainly seeking to return to it. 

'There was both truth and error in the impres- 
sion; the child and mother were estranged, but 
through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the lat- 
ter rambled from her side, another inmate had been 
admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, 
and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, 
the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted 
place, and hardly knew where she was. 

" *I have a strange fancy,' observed the sensitive 
minister, 'that this brook is the boundary between 
two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy 
Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the 
legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to 
cross a running stream ? Pray hasten her ; for this 
delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves.' 

" 'Come, dearest child 1' said Hester, encourag- 
ingly, and stretching out both her arms. 'How 
slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 153 

before now ? Here is a friend of mine, who must be 
thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much 
love, henceforward, as thy mother alone could give 
thee ! Leap across the brook, and come to us. Thou 
canst leap like a young deer T 

'Tearl, without responding in any manner to 
these honey-sweet expressions, remained on the 
other side of the brook. Now she fixed her bright, 
wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and 
now included them both in the same glance; as if 
to detect and explain to herself the relation which 
they bore to one another. For some unaccountable 
reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child's eyes 
upon himself, his hand— with that gesture so habit- 
ual as to have become involuntary — stole over his 
heart. At length, assuming a singular air of author- 
ity, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small 
forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards 
her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mirror of 
the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny 
image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger 

too. 

" Thou strange child, why dost thou not come 
to me ?' exclaimed Hester. 

'Tearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a 
frown gathered on her brow; the more impressive 
from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the 
features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept 
beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday 
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the chil4 stamped her 



154 HAWTHORNE 

foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture. 
In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the 
image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, 
and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect 
of Httle Pearl. 

" 'Hasten, Pearl ; or I shall be angry with thee V 
cried Hester Prynne, who, however inured to such 
behavior on the elf-child's part at other seasons, 
was naturally anxious for a more seemly deport- 
ment now. *Leap across the brook, naughty child, 
and run hither ! Else I must come to thee !' 

''But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's 
threats any more than mollified by her entreaties, 
now suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulat- 
ing violently and throwing her small figure into the 
most extravagant contortions. She accompanied 
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the 
woods reverberated on all sides; so that, alone as 
she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it 
seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her 
their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the 
brook, once more, was the shadowy wraith of 
Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, 
but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in 
the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at 
Hester's bosom! 

" 'I see what ails the child,' whispered Hester to 
the clergyman, and turning pale in spite of a strong 
effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance. *Chil- 
dren will not abide any, the slightest, change in the 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 155 

accustomed aspect of things that are daily before 
their eyes. Pearl misses something which she has 
always seen me wear T 

"T pray you,' answered the minister, 'if thou 
hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forth- 
with ! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old 
witch, like Mistress Hibbins,' added he, attempting 
to smile, 'I know nothing I would not sooner en- 
counter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's 
young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a pre- 
ternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest mel' 

"Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crim- 
son blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside 
at the clergyman, and then a heavy sigh; while, 
even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded 
to a deadly pallor. 

" Tearl,' said she, sadly, 'look down at thy feet ! 
There! — before thee! — on the hither side of the 
brook!' 

"The child turned her eyes to the point indicated ; 
and there lay the scarlet letter, so close upon the 
margin of the stream, that the gold embroidery was 
reflected in it. 

" 'Bring it hither !' said Hester. 

" 'Come thou and take it up !' answered Pearl. 

" 'Was ever such a child !' observed Hester, aside 
to the minister. 'Oh, I have much to tell thee about 
her! But in very truth she is right as regards this 
hateful token. I must bear its torture a little longer, 
— only a few days longer, — until we shall have left 



156 HAWTHORNE 

this region and look back hither as to a land which 
we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! 
The mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and 
swallow it up forever !' 

"With these words, she advanced to the margin 
of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened 
it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a moment 
ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the 
deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon 
her, as she thus received back this deadly symbol 
from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infi- 
nite space! — she had drawn an hour's free breath! 
— and here again was the scarlet misery, glittering 
on the old spot ! So it ever is, whether thus typified 
or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the char- 
acter of doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy 
tresses of her hair, and confined them beneath her 
cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad 
letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her 
womanhood, departed, like fading sunshine; and a 
gray shadow seemed to fall across her. 

''When the dreary change was wrought, she ex- 
tended her hand to Pearl. 

" *Dost thou know thy mother now, child ?' asked 
she, reproachfully, but with a subdued tone. 'Wilt 
thou come across the brook, and own thy mother, 
now that she has her shame upon her, — now that 
she is sad?' 

" *Yes ; now I will !' answered the child, bound- 
ing across the brook, and clasping Hester in her 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 157 

arms. 'Now thou art my mother indeed! And I 
am thy Httle Pearl !' " 

The history of the letter in the breast of the min- 
ister is, almost too obviously, a vivid contrast, an 
elaborate antithesis, to the open scarlet stigma on 
Hesters ]x)som. In her case, the story is of a pun- 
ishment striking in, coloring and absorbing life and 
growing vital therein ; his tale is of a secret sin strik- 
ing out, obscuring the face of life and transforming 
it to his eyes, and finally becoming physically mani- 
fest in his own body. The history of the punish- 
ment, in either case, can only be told by sign and 
symbol, for it is all an inward thing, a thing of the 
spirit, and although its workings have carnal mani- 
festations they are essentially secret and bodiless; 
hence a certain touch of fantasy pervades the 
thought and imagery of the book, as in a fable 
where things are to be taken, not ocularly and tan- 
gibly, but with the traditional "grain of salt." This 
recourse to the "grain of salt," as a defense or de- 
murrer, is a common subterfuge with Hawthorne, 
when he is not quite able to believe himself, — as if 
he were telling stories to children. The most singu- 
lar instance of this failure of faith in his own imag- 
ination is about to be given ; but this sort of doubt in 
what he is saying seems temperamental. The touch 
of fantasy, like a play of madness or fever, is con- 
stantly felt in the progress of the fates of the three 
main actors. There is something in the tale that 



158 HAWTHORNE 

seems to denaturalize life itself, alike in child and 
mother, and in the lovers, — here is a world truly out 
of tune. Fantasy, naturally, springs from an un- 
hinged or faltering mind. It easily takes form in 
Pearl's figure and actions; but that is, after all, a 
half -unconscious mirroring of Hester's.mind. In the 
wandering mind of the minister it has a more fatal 
career. "Why does he keep his hand over his 
heart?" is little Pearl's constant question. The sense 
of silence round his thoughts, of an unpenetrated re- 
serve, is only deepened by the hound-like watchful- 
ness of the physician, who has crept into his confi- 
dence, to spy out his secret. Once or twice, indeed, 
Hawthorne discloses the thoughts in the minister's 
heart, but the sense of the dual punishment of the 
secret and the known sinner is well preserved in a 
balanced contrast, till the moment of open discovery 
is to come. The difficulty is to tell of secret things, 
things alike unseen and unsaid, — and it is by fantasy 
that Hawthorne finds the way out. 

The finest, and perhaps the greatest scene, in the 
sense of that tableau which Hawthorne was accus- 
tomed to stage, is really preparatory to the denoue- 
ment, — the scene of the minister's midnight vigil on 
the same platform where Hester suffered her public 
exposure at the opening of the tale. With a certain 
skill all the leading characters are introduced, 
though some unbeknown to themselves, in the scene, 
which has the efTect of a drama on the stage, such as 
Richard's dream before the battle, on Bos worth 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 159 

field; but the center and climax of the situation is 
the sin breaking its secrecy in the minister's breast 
and blazing forth to all the world, though this pub- 
licity is, in fact, only symbolically achieved in the 
episode, notwithstanding the passing figures. The 
open confession is another matter. 

"Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, 
and perhaps actually under the influence of a species 
of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot 
where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived 
through her first hours of public ignominy. The 
same platform or scaffold, black and weather- 
stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long 
years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many 
culprits who had since ascended it, remained stand- 
ing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The 
minister went up the steps. 

*'It was an obscure night of early May. An un- 
varied pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of 
sky from zenith to horizon, li the same multitude 
which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester 
Prynne sustained her punishment could now have 
been summoned forth, they would have discerned 
no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline 
of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. 
But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of 
discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so 
pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, 
without other risk than that the dank and chill night- 



160 HAWTHORNE 

air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints 
with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh 
and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audi- 
ence of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye 
could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which 
had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody 
scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it 
but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, 
but in which his soul trifled with itself ! A mockery 
at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends re- 
joiced, with jeering laughter ! He had been driven 
hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged 
him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely 
linked companion was that Cowardice which in- 
variably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, 
just when the other impulse had hurried him to the 
verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what 
right had infirmity like his to burden itself with 
crime ? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their 
choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to 
exert their fierce and savage strength for a good 
purpose, and fling it off at once ! This feeble and 
most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet con- 
tinually did one thing or another, which intertwined, 
in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven- 
defying guilt and vain repentance. 

"And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this 
vain show of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was over- 
come with a great horror of mind, as if the universe 
were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 161 

right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, 
there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and 
poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort 
of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked 
aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the 
night, and was beaten back from one house to an- 
other, and reverberated from the hills in the back- 
ground; as if a company of devils, detecting so 
much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything 
of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro." 

Little by little the night-scene develops, with the 
death of a colonial magnate and the natural passing 
to and fro of the physician and the watchers and the 
old clergyman ih the dark street before the eyes of 
the minister on the platform, whose spirit is dark- 
ened and mind unhinged by hysterical thoughts. 
Physical hysteria, indeed, was evidently his state, 
and to his own involuntary "great peal of laughter" 
came the response of a **light, airy, childish laugh." 

" Tearl ! Little Pearl !' cried he after a moment's 
pause; then, suppressing his voice, — 'Hester! Hes- 
ter Prynne ! Are you there ?' 

" *Yes ; it is Hester Prynne !' she replied, in a 
tone of surprise; and the minister heard her foot- 
steps approaching from the sidewalk, along which 
she had been passing. Tt is I, and my little Pearl.' 

" 'Whence come you, Hester ?' asked the minister. 
*What sent you hither ?' 



162 HAWTHORNE 

" 'I have been watching at a death-bed/ answered 
Hester Prynne, — 'at Governor Winthrop's death- 
bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am 
now going homeward to my dwelHng.' 

" 'Come up hither, Hester, thou and httle Pearl,' 
said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. *Ye have both 
been here before, but I was not with you. Come up 
hither once again, and we will stand all three to- 
gether !' 

"She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the 
platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The 
minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it. 
The moment that he did so, there came what seemed 
a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his 
own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurry- 
ing through all his veins, as if the mother and the 
child were communicating their vital warmth to his 
half -torpid system. The three formed an electric 
chain. 

" 'Minister !' whispered little Pearl. 

"'What wouldst thou say, child?' asked Mr. 
Dimmesdale. 

" 'Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to- 
morrow noontide ?' inquired Pearl. 

" 'Nay; not so, my little Pearl,' answered the min- 
ister; for with the new energy of the moment, all 
the dread of public exposure, that had so long been 
the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and 
he was already trembling at the conjunction in 
which — with a strange joy, nevertheless — he now 



, THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 163 

found himself. *Not so, my child. I shall, indeed, 
stand with thy mother and thee, one other day, but 
not to-morrow.' 

"Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her 
hand. But the minister held it fast. 

" 'A moment longer, my child !' said he. 

" 'But wilt thou promise,' asked Pearl, *to take my 
hand and mother's hand, to-morrow noontide ?' 

" 'Not then. Pearl,' said the minister, 'but another 
time.' 

" *And what other time ?' persisted the child. 

" *At the great judgment day,' whispered the min- 
ister, — and, strangely enough, the sense that he was 
a professional teacher of the truth impelled him to 
answer the child so. 'Then, and there, before the 
judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must 
stand together. But the daylight of this world shall 
not see our meeting !' 

*'Pearl laughed again. 

"But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, 
a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled 
sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those me- 
teors, which the night-watcher may so often observe, 
burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the at- 
mosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it 
thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud 
betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault bright- 
ened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed 
the familiar scene of the street, with the distinctness 
of mid-day, but also with the aw fulness that is al- 



164 HAWTHORNE 

ways imparted to familiar objects by an unaccus- 
tomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting 
stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and 
thresholds, with the early grass springing up about 
them; the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned 
earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the 
market-place, margined with green on either side, — 
all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that 
seemed to give another moral interpretation to the 
things of this world than they had ever borne be- 
fore. And there stood the minister, with his hand 
over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the em- 
broidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and lit- 
tle Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link 
between those two. They stood in the noon of that 
strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light 
that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that 
shall unite all who belong to one another. 

"There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes, and 
her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, 
wore that naughty smile which made its expression 
frequently so elfish. She withdrew her hand from 
Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. 
But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and 
cast his eyes towards the zenith. 



"We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in 
his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking up- 
ward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 165 

an immense letter, — the letter A, — marked out in 
lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have 
shown itself at that point, burning duskily through 
a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty 
imagination gave it; or, at least, Avith so little defi- 
niteness, that another's guilt might have seen an- 
other symbol in it." 

The wavering of Hawthorne's faith in his own 
imagination is a curious thing, and to a certain ex- 
tent it infuses an element of weakness into his work, 
inasmuch as one begins to doubt if the author him- 
self quite believes in the truth of his own tale. Did 
it matter whether the script flaming in the sky was 
the letter A or not ? It was so that the minister saw 
it; and the truth v/as wdiat he saw, whether imag- 
inary or real. The actual phenomenon may have 
been one thing or another, — it is unconcerning and 
immaterial: the ideal truth, the abstract truth, the 
living truth was what the minister saw. The "air- 
drawn dagger" of Macbeth was such a reality. To 
question the ocular evidence in such a case is to deny 
the very nature of that ideal world in which the im- 
agination abides, and to confound the actual world 
with it. The two are apart and incommensurable. The 
truth is that Hawthorne, in subjection to the thoughts 
of his time, regarded the supernatural as something 
real indeed, but to be rationally explained and thus 
taken out of the category of the miraculous. The 
earlier effort of romancers before him had been to 



166 HAWTHORNE 

explain the miraculous by mechanical or equally 
obvious means of intentional deception, as mere 
ghost-tricks of one or another sort. Hawthorne, 
with a more subtle understanding and a finer hand, 
would explain the marvelous or mysterious by the 
psychology of the persons involved. He was fas- 
cinated by the mysterious in any of its many forms ; 
he was accustomed to deal in mystery, from the 
crude supernaturalism of witchcraft in the forest to 
the extravaganzas and refinements of fantasy; but 
he was ill at ease with old beliefs, and he wished to 
explain them by a rationalism that belonged to his 
own time. The psychological solution of the matter 
was at hand, and he utilized it : there was a lightning 
flash, and, given the state of the minister's mind, 
he may have thought he sazv the letter A blazing out 
his secret sin in heaven. The curious thing is that 
Hawthorne should have deemed it necessary to give 
any explanation or to have warned his readers to 
suspend their judgment as to the actual facts of the 
case. 

This reserve of Hawthorne in crediting his own 
story is still more remarkable when he comes to the 
central fact and climax of it all, so far as the min- 
ister is concerned. It is plain that the scene for 
which the last extract is preparatory, is at hand. 
The tragic reversal, to be precise, is due, — in fact, 
has already occurred symbolically by the portent in 
the sky. The opposition in the tale between Hester's 
shame and the minister's secret sin is about to be 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 167 

dissolved. The tragic reversal is fully accomplished 
when his breast is bared with the stigma stamped 
upon it in the flesh, and he stands confessed her 
lover on the same platform with her. Yet even here, 
at the climax of fate and when the logic of the tale 
is plain and convincing, Hawthorne implies much 
question as to the reality of the stigma bitten into 
the minister's long-hidden bosom. Did he believe 
his own tale ? one involuntarily asks : or did he 
sympathize with modern incredulity so far that he 
felt obliged to admit explanations, at least, as of 
miracles. The fact of such a stigma as a phenom- 
enon, however caused, has been repeatedly avouched, 
and is often attributed to the working of the mind on 
the body in moments or moods of intensity. What- 
ever was Hawthorne's motive, it must be allowed 
that, at any rate, his explanation, — that is, his ex- 
plaining away or permitting a doubt to intrude as 
to the actual facts — of the letter in the sky and on 
the minister's breast lies outside the story; for the 
story, to be whole and sound in imagination, re- 
quires them to be real. 

The history of the letter, which has been followed 
closely so far in the lives of the mother, the child 
and the lover with its so varying fortunes, as it 
gathered up and gave expression to their tortured 
lives, ends with the public self -exposure of the min- 
ister. The physician who is a mere observer and ac- 
complice, as it were, of the letter in the punishment, 
needs little comment, beyond the point that the pur- 



168 HAWTHORNE 

suit of revenge left its physical tokens of degeneracy 
on him in his face and appearance. Punishment of a 
sort he received for his part, both willing and un- 
willing, in the tangled fates of the little group, 
where he was the hater, and thought himself the 
avenger. Vengeance was worked out under his eyes, 
indeed, but it did not come from him. His part 
really seems superfluous, for one is told rather than 
sees how he plays with the minister's inner life and 
secrecy. 

It has been observed that Hawthorne in this tale 
worked under an extraordinary difficulty in finding 
outward expression for the inward spiritual life of 
the unhappy pair of lovers under their punishment, 
either of open shame or secret remorse. He sought 
to tell the story, as it were, in a visible language, b)^ 
means of the Scarlet Letter, the secret stigma, and 
the writing on the physician's face and figure. The 
last is made most plain in the midnight scene, when 
the lightning illuminated the sky and earth : 

"The minister appeared to see him [the physi- 
cian], with the same glance that discerned the mi- 
raculous letter. To his features, as to all other ob- 
jects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression ; 
or it might well be that the physician was not so 
careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malev- 
olence with which he looked upon his victim. Cer- 
tainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and dis- 
closed the earth, with an aw fulness that admonished 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 169 

Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of 
judgment, then might Roger Chilhngworth have 
passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there 
with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid 
was the expression, or so intense the minister's re- 
ception of it, that it seemed still to remain painted in 
the darkness, after the meteor had vanished, with an 
effect as if the street and all things else were at once 
annihilated/' 

This writing of all secret things of the soul's ex- 
periences and changes in visible lineaments, as it 
were, pervades the method of the narrative, and 
proceeds from the vivid imaginative force of Haw- 
thorne's genius, which habitually worked with vis- 
ualizing power. He seems to have been dependent 
to an unusual degree on his visualizing power to 
bring home the reality of things. The trait was per- 
haps connected with his rare powers of observation. 
At all events, the absorption of his mind in the phys- 
ical object and his loading and reloading it with sig- 
nificance and suggestion tend to overcharge the ma- 
terial elements of the tale, in comparison with its 
spiritual substance; the letter, itself, tends to take 
the place alike of sin and punishment. One follows 
its history as a separate evil thing that has its vic- 
tims in its power. But of the actual state of the 
bosoms of these characters, that the letter symbol- 
izes in various forms, what is really told? What 
repentance was there in the breasts of either? What 



170 HAWTHORNE 

was their after-thought of their great passion? 
There is only the one startHng sentence of Hester, 
that throws a hght more penetrating than the fire in 
heaven upon them : 

" *Never, never !' whispered she. 'What we did 
had a consecration of its own. We felt it so ! We 
said so to each other ! Hast thou forgotten it?' " 

Few words; but none are more humanly signifi- 
cant in the whole story. How little after all Haw- 
thorne's method achieved in unfolding the secrets 
of the soul's experience! Some of the ways of its 
torturing thoughts are illustrated, some of their is- 
sues and expedients ; but of the silent lives of Hester 
and her lover in themselves, is anything really re- 
vealed? Was the physical image of the Scarlet Let- 
ter capable of holding and releasing the story, or did 
it fail, partly because it drew the story down into a 
world of interpretation through physical symbols, 
not of the soul's region, and weakened, besides, by 
Hawthorne's own incredulity in them? 

The Scarlet Letter is a tale of doomed lives 
without escape, and one looks on at the tragedy as 
at a play of fate. But the true inevitability of fate, 
that makes the sweep and force of great tragedy, is 
not in the play, as it develops before the eye. Plain 
as the situation of each of the characters is, the char- 
acters themselves are not made known, and espe- 
cially is this true of Hester and her lover. Hester 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 171 

seems a greater character than belonged to that Httle 
world of the Puritan colony, and her womanly na- 
ture is never given its range, while her lover, though 
infinitely weaker in fiber, has no career developing 
his own individuality; he appears only as the slave 
of his profession, and, if she was of a larger, he 
was of a smaller type than belonged to their en- 
vironment. All that appears in the human story is 
a tangle of fatal events. The moral lesson, if that 
be sought, is hard and dark. The kindly elements 
of life, its self-healing power, the ways of absolu- 
tion are excluded, as if they were not. Pearl, the 
child, is the child of the Scarlet Letter only : she 
scarcely seems her mother's child. There is an arbi- 
trariness in the tale, as of a sentence sealed and de- 
livered, to be carried out. It strikes one, not with 
the inevitability of great art grounded in human 
character and the nature of this world, but as the 
history of the sentence of a court. 

Fantasy, which is a kind of wild imagination, had 
a large career in the literature of the early nineteenth 
century. Perhaps it was most obvious, poetically, in 
Coleridge, but it sprang up, like a tender herb, 
everywhere, in prose and verse, abroad and at home. 
To speak vaguely, it was of the temperament of the 
times. In Hawthorne's genius it was omnipotent 
and pervasive, a form of wandering thought that 
put forth where it would on any page. It blossomed 
in unexpected places, with a random and uncon- 
trolled movement that showed its natural sponta- 



172 HAWTHORNE 

neity. Sometimes it took possession of an image or 
an idea, like an elfish spirit of art, and moulded out 
of it gargoyles of expression, as it were, transitory 
suggestions and intimations. Hawthorne's thoughts 
are full of such singularities. The true imagination, 
the rational imagination, relaxes its rigor, and in its 
place come reverie and dream, the half -perceived, 
the divined, the mere play of the wakeful brain. If 
then, the image or idea, already fantastic in its birth, 
is given a free course to develop itself, without the 
interference of the rational element, strange works 
of art result, oftentimes original in form and mys- 
terious in content. The physical image, as Haw- 
thorne conceived it, had a touch of such fantasy, and 
to what an extent it developed in the case of the 
Scarlet Letter has just been illustrated. Such an 
image tends to escape from its creator and develop 
its own life. It is because Hawthorne feels the im- 
age breaking away from him that he questions its 
realit}^ at the moments of climax in the minister's 
history. Fantasy had carried Hawthorne further 
than, as a rationalist, he felt justified in going. 

But a deeper truth of art lies in the matter. It 
has been noticed that Hawthorne gives the double 
impression of ''managing" his characters, at times, 
or specifically in the case of Pearl, and of a certain 
arbitrariness in the general plot, as of a thing whose 
course and issue were agreed upon and detennined 
in advance. In harmony with this, it is to be ob- 
served that artifice is the natural accomplice of fan- 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 173 

tasy, in art, because the fantastic by its very nature 
is easily subject to change, being uncontrolled by 
any inner law of its structure as rational imagina- 
tion is controlled. The master of fantasy and the 
fantastic in American poetry is Poe; and it has 
often been alleged that artifice is the breath of his 
genius. So extreme a charge is unjust, even when 
he lends color to it himself; but this much is true, 
that artifice is the temptation of the artist of the 
fantastic, if for a moment his genius fails. The 
large element of fantasy in Hawthorne's imagina- 
tion is obvious to his readers; the check upon his 
acceptance of it, in working out his stories as true 
narratives of facts, is equally plain; and the manipu- 
lation of the various parts of the tales, by reduplica- 
tion and echo and like devices, is an example of the 
sort of artifice that he consciously resorted to. The 
ingenuity of his construction and development of 
theme in fiction recall the same marked quality in 
Poe's genius, and it is at least curious that fantasy 
was a chief ingredient in the imagination of both. 
In the case of both, their works, at times, seem 
rather made than grown, and yet, at times, have a 
vitality of their own. Fantasy, like true imagina- 
tion, has its own principle of life. 

Hawthorne's art in The Scarlet Letter, it must 
be borne in mind, was something quite different 
from his material. The material was moral, and 
hence noble ; the art was fantastic ; the content was 
abstract. The whole work was thus strangely com- 



174 HAWTHORNE 

posite. The Puritan setting of the scene was sim- 
ple and dignified, and passes before the eye Hke the 
scenes of a play with fit backgrounds and properties ; 
but on that quasi-religious stage the movement and 
color and tone seem almost operatic, and the land- 
scapes, groups and tableaux a performance of for- 
eign opera. The Scarlet Letter itself is a brilliant 
focus for all the meaning of the tale ; and as it comes 
again and again in the child and in the sky and on 
the minister's breast, it varies without changing the 
central theme, till it dies out in the fatal climax 
and collapse of the drama. Hester, herself, seems an 
operatic character, sole and simple in eminence, and 
Pearl an operatic child. Fantasy, more than reality, 
envelops the scene. The suffering after the sin en- 
nobles the theme with moral grandeur. The abstract 
element, — namely, that this is a story, not of indi- 
viduals, but of the fatal penalties of violated law 
working out its nature in the human breast, — is 
felt from the rise to the fall of the curtain. But the 
art by which this is rendered is not, one feels, quite 
dramatic or operatic ; it is something more original 
and idiosyncratic, peculiar, indeed, to Hawthorne, — 
Hawthornesque ; the art of a fantastic imagination, 
ingenious in its methods, somewhat skeptical of its 
own vision, somber in meditation, brooding on sin 
after the fashion of old New England. 

Any art, literary or other, is, to a certain extent, 
shut within its own age, and can be thoroughly un- 
derstood in all its tones and shades, and will seem 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 175 

wholly natural, only to the spirit of that age. The 
world's greatest works, works of universal art, alone 
escape this limitation. The Scarlet Letter, though 
it has aspects of universal meaning, is essentially a 
provincial romance; it requires a contemporary of 
Hawthorne for its most sympathetic and under- 
standing reader. Its peculiar fantasy will come nat- 
ural, indeed, only to one habituated to the tone of 
the literature of that time; too often it will seem 
whimsical, odd, individualistic. Other writers of the 
age, however, had such a fashion of thought and ex- 
pression. Contemporaneity is, perhaps, still more 
marked in that vein of sentimentality, from which 
few American writers v/ere wholly free in the first 
half of the century, and which is occasionally to be 
observed in Hawthorne's juvenile and slighter work. 
The early years of Lowell, even, were subject to 
it, and it had its peculiar and forgotten memorials 
among the books and reputations of that truly lit- 
erary age. The traits of the time as a period, inde- 
pendent of persons, have never been made out in 
our history; but, when this shall be done, it will be 
found that both fantasy and sentimentality were 
dominant in that generation. The age read, as well 
as created its literature, with its own eyes; and in 
particular, in the case of the Puritan romance, it 
had a preconceived notion of Puritanism, derived 
from its own tradition and reactions thereon, to 
which it instinctively required any imaginative ac- 
count of it to conform. It may be doubted whether 



176 HAWTHORNE 

the eminent Puritan worthies would have found the 
romance a faithful and illuminating record of their 
httle state, but it certainly represented what the sev- 
enth or eighth generation in New England wished 
to believe of their founders. In other words, the 
romance is not an original product of the Puritan 
age, but a history written long after the facts, in 
consonance with later notions. It made its appeal to 
a generation of harsh judgment, as regards the 
Puritan state, that found the hard and dark ele- 
ments in the tale agreeable to their view of that 
older Hfe; and the kind of art employed, with its 
touches of fantasy and sentiment, was one that 
might almost l^e called native to the community. 

The thoughtful reader, too, can not fail to won- 
der to what an extent Hawthorne was actually in- 
terested in the moral problems that are the heart of 
the mystery in the tale. Artist that he was and capa- 
ble, as has been seen, of great indifference to mortal 
concerns, was he attracted only by the vivid and 
condensed story, and less concerned with the inner 
spiritual histories and moralities? The attraction of 
the general theme, the motifs of the secrets of the 
bosom, solitary guilt and hypocrisy, the habit of his 
mind to brood on the darker aspects of man's moral 
life would seem to certify that he had a real rather 
than a purely artistic interest in the spiritual history 
of the Puritan outcasts. This may readily be 
granted. As an artist, indeed, he found a solution 
of the plots in the tragic reversal, bringing about the 



THE GREAT PURITAN ROMANCE 177 

minister's confession and public exposure ; but, as a 
moralist, he found no solution, inasmuch as the con- 
fession left things very much as they were, with no 
visible absolution or forgiveness. The sin is repre- 
sented as irreparable; the broken order of life is in 
no sense restored. There is nothing left at the end 
but a pitiful tale of mortal frailty, and its issues. It 
is this impotence of the moralist to bring his tale to 
a conclusion, as the artist had done, which makes 
the discord at the close. One feels that Hawthorne 
was more competent in art than in meditation ; and 
this sustains the impression that comes from many 
sides, alike of his work and of his nature, that he 
was, primarily, an artist in all his career. This, how- 
ever, does not at all impeach the reality, and indeed 
the depth, of his interest in the moral material, 
which is the true substance of all his work. 

It must be plain, from the tenor of these observa- 
tions that the contemporaneity of his own time en- 
tered into Hawthorne's great Puritan romance, both 
in art and thought, to a degree that differentiates it 
from works of ideal art, truly independent of time 
and place. It is engaged in the literary and moral 
fashions of its times, and so shot through with the 
tem.perament of old New England as Plawthorne 
knew it, as to make the modern reader not wholly 
sympathetic with either the substance or the manner 
of the tale ; it must strike him, in many ways, as old- 
fashioned. Universal as the theme is, it is given in 
a strictly New England view, and is colored by 



178 HAWTHORNE 

ways of feeling and expression that belong to a past 
age. It is not characteristically, but only historically, 
an American tale ; truly speaking, both by its origin 
and its manner, it is purely of New England. The 
isolation of the scene, the condensation of the motif, 
the great abstractness of the content, which are all 
somewhat dependent on the strong use made of 
symbolism by means of the letter, give an appear- 
ance of universal art, but on a closer examination it 
proves to be less an expression of the general heart 
of man than a product of a local environment. The 
Scarlet Letter is the chief monument that the New 
England literary age left behind it in fiction. It is 
the ornament of a small though flourishing litera- 
ture, and the fruit, in its idea, of a peculiar religious 
society in a remote quarter of a sparsely inhabited 
world ; it belongs by both these traits to the provin- 
cial in literature, and the more it is examined, the 
more evident is the texture of contemporaneity and 
locality in it. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 

IT was the lot of this New Englander to go abroad, 
— not merely to England, which was but a change 
of homes, as from county to county, Berkshire to 
Essex, — but to another and different world, to Italy. 
Hawthorne is our chief example of the picturesque 
early American tourist. Irving, indeed, had viewed 
Spain, and Bayard Taylor tramped the Orient ; but 
Italy came fresh from Hawthorne's pen. His nature 
was predisposed to the experience by virtue of that 
predilection for artistic things, which has already 
been commented on as evinced almost from the be- 
ginning of his career, and by a certain amateurish 
interest in portraits and carving and artistic handi- 
work of various sorts, noticeable throughout his 
writings. To such an observant eye, and to a mind 
so stored v/ith sentiment and imagination, Italy be- 
came at once an environment as close as his own 
Berkshire hills or Essex woods; he wrote about it 
with the same minuteness and precision of object 
and outline, as to the external scene, and he caught 
its atmosphere of classic myth or medieval aspect 
or simple, idyllic, momentary charm as naturally as 
if they were only a new variety of the mosses about 

179 



180 HAWTHORNE 

his own Old Manse. His note-books show how his 
senses became filled with Italy as in those days it 
came first to the eyes of the sentimental and faithful 
tourist ; and it is this vision, — for it can scarcely be 
called less, — that he spread before his old readers 
in The Marble Faun, wnth its gardens, its galleries 
and churches and squares, Monte Beni with its 
''sunshine" wine, the golden atmosphere of the hills, 
the frolic of the carnival, and the thousand minute 
Italian touches that make up the ground of that pic- 
tured story. The environment is all Italian, as he 
had eyes to see it, as in his earlier tales it had been 
all New England. The scene is really separate 
from the tale, however closely inwoven the latter 
seems, like figures in a tapestry ; but the history that 
is displayed on this background and runs in and out 
of the landscape scenes, is a pure New England 
fable. 

It is needful to draw sharply the distinction be- 
tween the moral tale, with the general type of which 
the reader of Hawthorne is already acquainted, and 
the fascination of the Italian scene in which it is set. 
They are opposed very much as the ancestral curse 
in The House of the Seven Gables is relieved 
against the manners and customs and aspects of old 
Salem. Rome is the scene of the play; but the the- 
ater is as interesting as the drama, to say the least ; 
perhaps, in the issue, it is more so. The story, then, 
which must be the chief thing in a novel, is after 
Hawthorne's well-established make. The characters 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 181 

are few, — substantially only four, Donatello, Mir- 
iam, Hilda and Kenyon, the first three sharply con- 
trasted, the last of a neutral tint and hardly more 
than a convenience in the narrative. Hawthorne 
takes no marked interest in them as persons, though 
he displays more feeling for Donatello's youth than 
is customary with him. There is, perhaps, here a 
reflection of the impression made upon him by an 
Italian trait, — that southern gaiety of spirit, un- 
known to northern temperaments. However, he was 
as little concerned to tell anything of the after-life 
of Donatello as he was to speak clearly of the earlier 
life of Miriam; he was indifferent to their personal 
fortunes. His interest, quite as plainly as in The 
Scarlet Letter, is restricted to the abstract element 
in the tale, namely, its moral truth. How did their 
careers illustrate this, and make it evident, is all his 
question. Miriam is a woman with an unknown 
past, and acquainted with evil, though under what 
form is not told; Donatello is a type of natural inno- 
cence, brought in contact with her by his love and 
so led to an impulsive crime in her behalf; his crime, 
felt to be sin, results in such spiritual development 
that it can only be described by saying his soul was 
born thereby. The birth of the soul through sin is 
the moral theme ; the scene is staged for it ; the plot 
is made for it; the characters fulfil their part in 
merely illustrating it. This being the end in view, 
the characters are suppressed, except so far as they 
advance it. 



182 HAWTHORNE 

What has hitherto been designated the economy 
of Hawthorne's art is shown, not only in this re- 
striction of the characters, but by the ehmination of 
action, both of which w^ere customary marks of his 
manner. The act which is central and capital in the 
plot is the least of an act possible, in the circum- 
stances; though it is nothing less than murder, it 
occupies but a brief space, a moment, of the tale, and 
though it was the climax of Miriam's former and 
darker life, it is substantially unexplained. The im- 
pulse, which led Donatello to do the deed by a sud- 
den seizure of emotion, seems disconnected with 
any facts of that interior tragedy, whatever its na- 
ture. The act, once done, appears wholly severed 
from its circumstances ; it is not a particular crime, 
with a history and explanation of its own, but a 
sin, — sin in the abstract. Any other crime would 
have served the purpose; what was essential to the 
story was the destruction of Donatello's innocence. 
The situation is not so different to that of The 
Scarlet Letter , where there is a like indifference to 
the element of action. There the sin was previous to 
the opening of the scene, here it is a part of the nar- 
rative, but in either case it is a fact presupposed by 
the story, an hypothesis given; the interest in both 
is not in the action, but in the suffering. The action, 
in other words, like the characters, is subordinated 
to the moral thesis, which is, again, the main subject 
of meditation, — the history of the soul in sin; and 
the method, by which Hawthorne discloses this his- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 183 

tory, is not by action, but by portraying in indirect 
ways states of the soul. The physical image, how- 
ever, which had served him so long as an interpreter 
of moral phenomena, had now exhausted its powers, 
at least in its original form of a clear and definite 
object in which significance could be concentrated 
and reinforced by various devices. A relic of it re- 
mains in the pointed ears of the Faun, hesitatingly 
ascribed to Donatello, as the sign and symbol of his 
ancestral heritage of a state of nature which his 
mortal sin disturbed ; but it is only a relic and sur- 
vival of the earlier manner, and plays no serious part 
in the new tale. 

The intent of the story is plain. It is a meditation 
on the effects of sin on a state of nature, on that 
simple innocence which, legends tell, filled the Ar- 
cadian world before 

"disproportioned sin 

Broke the fair music that all creatures made." 

Donatello is an inhabitant, a "strayed reveller," as it 
were, from that virgin and paradisiacal region. He 
is snared in the earthly curse ; and the tale is of his 
transformation into a different being, a spiritual be- 
ing, whose experience of sin had made him human 
by developing in him the sorrowful but intelligent 
soul that is characteristic of humanity. This is a 
higher state, in the hierarchy of being, it would ap- 
pear, than the primevar mountain innocence he had 
known in his youth. But the matter is perplexing. 



184 HAWTHORNE 

For one thing, clearly this new Fall of Man is sub- 
stantially a rise in spiritual grade. The conception 
of sin as a means of grace is, in a sense, paradoxical. 
Hawthorne must have felt the black drop in this 
philosophy. At all events, here, no less than in The 
Scarlet Letter, he told a tale of doomed lives for 
which there is no issue; Donatello and Miriam go to 
their unknown fate, at the end, in great mystery, but 
if Kenyon's parting address to them — a perfectly 
correct little sermon from the New England stand- 
point — is any indication of what was in store for 
their mortal fate, there was to be only a secondary 
and tempered happiness for them, if any. The diffi- 
culty seems to be that Hawthorne was better aware 
of the ways into tragedy than of the ways that lead 
out. At all events, vv^iatever his flashes of knovv^l- 
edge, or intuition, of the maladies of the soul, his 
spiritual solutions are unsatisfactory. They are, in 
fact, no solutions; they end in closed ways, over 
which he drops a veil. 

The difficulty, implicit in his artistic methods, of 
representing the states of the soul, which he desires 
to express, is the same here as in the earlier romance 
of sin in soul. In the absence of such a symbol as 
the Scarlet Letter, he resorts to many physical 
images, instead of one, which serve him as so many 
mirrors of unspoken thoughts or distant events ; and 
he uses myth and fancy to reduplicate the themes 
and moods that are dominant in the play of his im- 
agination. The scene of the drawings and sketches, 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 185 

the introduction of the figures of St. Michael and 
the Cenci, the myth of the fountain nymph and her 
knightly lover illustrate this reverberation of idea 
and emotion from episode to episode through the 
unfolding stages of the narrative; in essence, though 
superficially different, it is the same method as that 
employed in the Puritan tale by the repeated emer- 
gence of the Scarlet Letter on its various back- 
grounds. The sense of the blood-stain, the touch of 
pollution, the loss of purity are made, though only 
in consciousness, the outward and visible sign of the 
change wrought in Donatello; his suffering in his 
new moodiness is plain ; but, when the most has been 
done to externalize and give color and form to his 
spiritual history, the legend of the birth of the soul 
remains obscure. He had become aware of dark and 
terrible elements in the world and of strange and ill- 
understood reactions within him in response to ex- 
periences he had blindly encountered, — this is all 
that is told of the matter. It seems inadequate for 
such a history as was seemingly undertaken. 

The assumption of the myth of the world before 
sin, the Rousseau-like state of nature, the prehu- 
man, faun-and-nymph world, is easily made in that 
land of classical fragments and visible joy; and 
Hawthorne describes it with his New England pen 
of light fantasy and wild nature. The forest of the 
new world had prepared his heart for it. The scene 
of the murder breaks in on this sunny landscape, — a 
midnight scene in ruins, It is a chapter of theatrical 



186 HAWTHORNE 

romance, by itself, and seems like an extract from 
an old, so-called "Gothic" tale. Then comes the long 
and delaying after-play of fate, in the slow and 
dumb torture of the nascent soul, surprised in its 
birth by the rising and hostile shapes of sorrow. 
Perhaps the most vivid moment, the most condensed 
form of the transformation of Donatello, is when 
he makes trial of his boyhood power of confident 
converse with the creatures of the wood, and finds 
that the old spell that made him a friend of the wild 
and innocent world, is gone. What is evident in all 
this is the intent of the moral tale ; but what charms 
is the scene, whether it be the sylvan dance in the 
gardens, the tragic Tarpeian rock at midnight, or 
the Italian burst of wild weeping over the passing 
of youth. 

The three episodes characterize the stages of the 
tale. The first is a glade of Eden before the en- 
trance of the serpent, and is, perhaps, in feature and 
atmosphere, the gayest passage in Hawthorne's al- 
bum of old-fashioned fancies. It is almost a reverie, 
so still and dreamlike is the motion, so pictorial in 
effect that it issues naturally, and by unobserved 
transition, in the marble dance of the sarcophagus, 
w^ith its tragic suggestion of change and fate, — till 
all is dissipated, and the scene is brought back to 
reality with the forward leap of the demon of the 
play, "the model," into the living group : 

"Donatello, brisk and cheerful as he seemed be- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 187 

fore, showed a sensibility to Miriam's gladdened 
mood by breaking into still wilder and ever-vary- 
ing activity. He frisked around her, bubbling over 
with joy, which clothed itself in words that had 
little individual meaning, and in snatches of song 
that seemed as natural as bird-notes. Then they 
both laughed together, and heard their own laugh- 
ter returning the echoes, and laughed again at the 
response, so that the ancient and solemn grove be- 
came full of merriment for these two blithe spirits. 
A bird happening to sing cheerily, Donatello gave a 
peculiar call, and the little feathered creature came 
fluttering about his head, as if it had known him 
through many summers. 

" *How close he stands to nature !' said Miriam, 
observing this pleasant familiarity between her com- 
panion and the bird. 'He shall make me as natural 
as himself for this one hour.' . . . 

"So the shadowy Miriam almost outdid Donatello 
on his own ground. They ran races with each 
other, side by side, with shouts and laughter; they 
pelted one another with early flowers, and gathering 
them up twined them with green leaves into gar- 
lands for both their heads. They played together 
like children, or creatures of immortal youth. So 
much had they flung aside the sombre habitudes of 
daily life, that they seemed born to be sportive for- 
ever, and endowed with eternal mirthfulness instead 
of any deeper joy. It was a glimpse far backward 
into Arcadian life, or, further still, into the Golden 



188 HAWTHORNE 

Age, before mankind was burdened with sin and 
sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with 
those shadows that bring it into high rehef, and 
make it happiness. 

" *Hark !' cried Donatello, stopping short, as he 
was about to bind Miriam's fair hands with flowers, 
and lead her along in triumph, 'there is music some- 
where in the grove !' 

" 'It is your kinsman, Pan, most likely,' said Mir- 
iam, 'playing on his pipe. Let us go seek him, and 
make him puff out his rough cheeks and pipe his 
merriest air! Come; the strain of music will guide 
us onward like a gaily colored thread of silk.' 

" 'Or like a chain of flowers,' responded Dona- 
tello, drawing her along by that which he had 
twined. 'This way ! — Come !' 

"As the music came fresher on their ears, they 
danced to its cadence, extemporizing new steps and 
attitudes. Each varying movement had a grace 
which might have been worth putting into marble, 
for the long delight of days to come, but vanished 
with the movement that gave it birth, and was ef- 
faced from memory by another. In Miriam's mo- 
tion, freely as she flung herself into the frolic of the 
hour, there was still an artful beauty; in Donatello's 
there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness 
hand in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most 
provocative of laughter, and yet akin to pathos, so 
deeply did it touch the heart. This was the ultimate 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 189 

peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between 
the sylvan creature and the beautiful companion at 
his side. Setting apart only this, Miriam resembled 
a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun. 

"There were flitting moments, indeed, when she 
played the sylvan character as perfectly as he. Catch- 
ing glimpses of her, then, you would have fancied 
that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her 
dance freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in 
her human form as that which rustles in the leaves ; 
or that she had emerged through the pebbly bottom 
of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle 
in the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around 
her, and suddenly disappearing in a shower of rain- 
bow drops. 

"As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, 
so in Miriam there were symptoms that the frolic 
of her spirits would at last tire itself out. 

*' *Ah ! Donatello,* cried she, laughing, as she 
stopped to take breath; *you have an unfair advan- 
tage over me ! I am no true creature of the woods ; 
while you are a real Faun, I do believe. When your 
curls shook just now, methought I had a peep at the 
pointed ears.' 

"Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as 
fauns and satyrs taught us first to do, and seemed to 
radiate jollity out of his whole nimble person. Never- 
theless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his 
face, as if he dreaded that a moment's pause might 



190 HAWTHORNE 

break the spell, and snatch away the sportive com- 
panion whom he had waited for through so many 
dreary months. 

" 'Dance ! dance !' cried he, joyously. *If we take 
breath, we shall be as we were yesterday. There, 
now, is the music, just beyond this clump of trees. 
Dance, Miriam, dance !' 

**They had now reached an open, grassy glade (of 
which there are many in that artfully constructed 
wilderness), set round with stone seats, on which 
the aged moss had kindly essayed to spread itself 
instead of cushions. On one of the stone benches 
sat the musicians, whose strains had enticed our wild 
couple thitherward. They proved to be a vagrant 
band, such as Rome, and all Italy, abounds with; 
comprising a harp, a flute, and a violin, which, 
though greatly the worse for wear, the performers 
had skill enough to provoke and modulate into tol- 
erable harmony. It chanced to be a feast-day ; and, 
instead of playing in the sun-scorched piazzas of the 
city, or beneath the windows of some unresponsive 
palace, they had bethought themselves to try the 
echoes of these woods; for, on the festas of the 
Church, Rome scatters its merry-makers all abroad, 
ripe for the dance or any other pastime. 

"As Miriam and Donatello emerged from among 
the trees, the musicians scraped, tinkled, or blew, 
each according to his various kind of instrument, 
more inspiringly than ever. A dark-cheeked little 
girl, with bright black eyes, stood by, shaking a tarn- 



, THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 191 

bourine set round with tinkling bells, and thumping 
it on its parchment head. Without interrupting his 
brisk, though measured movement, Donatello 
snatched away this unmelodious contrivance, and 
flourishing it above his head, produced music of in- 
describable potency, still dancing with frisky step, 
and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little 
bells, all in one jovial act. . . . 

"The harper thrummed with rapid fingers; the 
violin-player flashed his bow back and forth across 
the strings; the flautist poured his breath in quick 
puffs of jollity, while Donatello shook the tambour- 
ine above his head, and led the merry throng with 
unweariable steps. As they followed one another in 
a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one 
of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, 
or bacchanals is twined around the circle of an an- 
tique vase ; or it was like the sculptured scene on the 
front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as often as 
any other device, a festive procession mocks the 
ashes and white bones that are treasured up within. 
You might take it for a marriage-pageant; but after 
a while, if you look at those merry-makers, follow- 
ing them from end to end of the marble coflin, you 
doubt whether their gay movement is leading them 
to a happy close. A youth has suddenly fallen in 
the dance ; a chariot is overturned and broken, fling- 
ing the charioteer headlong to the ground ; a maiden 
seems to have grown faint or weary and is drooping 
on the bosom of a friend. Always some tragic inci- 



192 HAWTHORNE 

dent is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the 
spectacle ; and when once it has caught your eye you 
can look no more at the festal portions of the scene, 
except with reference to this one slightly suggested 
doom and sorrow. 

"As in its mirth, so in the darker characteristic 
here alluded to, there was an analogy between the 
sculptured scene on the sarcophagus and the wild 
dance which we have been describing. In the midst 
of its madness and riot Miriam found herself sud- 
denly confronted by a strange figure that shook its 
fantastic garments in the air, and pranced before 
her on its tiptoes, almost vying with the agility of 
Donatello himself. It was the model." 

It is impossible to escape a certain feeling of un- 
reality in this scene. It has the artificiality of the 
stage, or, better, the opera, — of something arranged 
and made to be looked at. It is too visibly, to use 
the word hitherto employed, a tableau, a wall-fresco, 
an echo of the sarcophagus. It is not often that fine 
art, in the strict sense, moulds the form and expres- 
sion of literature is so manifest a way. Hawthorne's 
artistic senses, — ^his eye for line and shape and light, 
for grouping and relief, were, no doubt, vividly re- 
inforced by the arts in Italy; he always had a cer- 
tain taste and tendency toward visible art, as has 
been observed above; but no small portion of the 
gaiety and natural high spirits of this scene came 
from observation and his fresh contacts with life 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 193 

itself in Italy in its free and primitive forms. The 
impression of unreality, as of a picture or bas-relief, 
is undeniable ; but it is no greater than that which in- 
vades the mind in reading some of Hawthorne's 
New England sketches, the insubstantiality of 
which, when dream or reverie or fantasy seems to 
control his imagination, has been mentioned. The 
whole conception of the care-free primitive world m 
which the faun-like nature of Donatello had its 
birth and being, and of which the dance is but a 
symbolic manifestation, is of no stronger woof. It 
is all an invention of Hawthorne's brain, drawn from 
the Golden Age, and memories of Tanglewood, and 
the vision of Italy. Its unreality is its charm. 

It must be acknowledged, too, that a kindred un- 
reality pervades the next scene, that of the murder. 
The act itself, being reduced to the lowest possible 
terms, occupies but a line or two. The outstanding 
fact of the situation is not the death, but the passion 
of the two lovers, first truly known in their moral 
communion in the crime. The "rage" of Donatello, 
which *1iad kindled him into a man" and "had de- 
veloped within him an intelligence," is briefly dwelt 
on ; but it is the moment after, when Miriam and 
Donatello drew together, "arm in arm, heart in 
heart," that is expanded in their consciousness. The 
exaltation of feeling at this cHmax of guilt is notice- 
able, and recalls the much briefer words, already 
quoted, which denoted the same climax in the earlier 
case of Hester and the Puritan minister; the later 



194 HAWTHORNE 

lovers, not unlike the former pair, were brought to- 
gether in "one emotion, and that a kind of rapture," 
in their embrace ; the world seemed annihilated, and 
they to live in a sphere of their own. This may be 
correct psychological analysis ; violent and unknown 
emotions disturb the sanity of the universe, as it 
were, and give rise to spectral scenes ; but the move- 
ments and the mood of Donatello and Miriam as 
they emerge from the murder have just the unreal- 
ity, the nervous tension, of high-strung tragedy. 
Without meaning to place the two instances on a 
par, the parallel between "the far-off noise of sing- 
ing and laughter" of their companions and "the 
knocking at the gate" in Macbeth is obvious; but 
here one still remains with the murder, inside the 
gate. The exaltation of feeling in Donatello and 
Miriam continues ; it blends with great Roman mem- 
ories of imperial tragedy; and it fades out in that 
strange and terrifying climax of thought and feel- 
ing which makes all criminals one kindred. 

The touch of fever at such a moment in a tragic 
story, the note of delirium, the unforeseen motion of 
thought in the wild whirl of emotion, unnatural and 
paradoxical as they may seem, are true to a distem- 
pered nature; unreality is just the impression that 
ought to be given. It is not for the purpose, how- 
ever, of illustrating the ways of literary art that 
these remarks are made, but rather to show how 
thoroughgoing is the artistic unreality of this ro- 
mance, in all its creative facts, as distinguished from 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 195 

those that merely reproduce the aspects and things 
of the actual Italy of Hawthorne's day. The Golden 
Age and the moral law belong to no period, to no 
land nor climate. The legend and the tale of Monte 
Beni lift far away from realism in any form; they 
were conceived in the pure sphere of the imagina- 
tion, where "things more real than living man" in- 
habit; and this trait, wherein the genius of the work 
consists, is most manifest in such "unrealities" as 
have been dwelt on in these comments on both the 
pastoral dance and the tragedy. But behold the 
tragedy, — before and after! 

"Meanwhile Miriam had not noticed the depart- 
ure of the rest of the company; she remained on the 
edge of the precipice and Donatello along with her. 

" Tt would be a fatal fall, still/ she said to her- 
self, looking over the parapet, and shuddering as 
her eye measured the depth. *Yes; surely yes! Even 
without the weight of an overburdened heart, a hu- 
man body would fall heavily enough upon those 
stones to shake all its joints asunder. How soon it 
would be over !' 

"Donatello, of whose presence she w^as possibly 
not aware, now pressed closer to her side ; and he, 
too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and 
trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that per- 
ilous fascination which haunts the brow of preci- 
pices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over 
for the very horror of the thing, for, after drawing 



196 HAWTHORNE 

hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting him- 
self out farther than before. He then stood silent 
a brief space, struggling, perhaps, to make himself 
conscious of the historic associations of the scene. 

" 'What are you thinking of, Donatello?' asked 
Miriam. 

" *Who are they,' said he, looking earnestly in her 
face, Svho have been flung over here in days 
gone by?' 

" 'Men that cumbered the virorld,' she replied. 
*Men whose lives were the bane of their fellow- 
creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the 
common breath of all, for their own selfish pur- 
poses. There was short work with such men in old 
Roman times. Just in the moment of their triumph, 
a hand, as of an avenging giant, clutched them, and 
dashed the wretches down this precipice.' 

" 'Was it well done ?' asked the young man. 

" Tt was well done,' answered Miriam ; 'innocent 
persons were saved by the destruction of a guilty 
one, who deserved his doom.' 

"While this brief conversation passed, Donatello 
had once or twice glanced aside with a watchful air, 
just as a hound may often be seen to take sidelong 
note of some suspicious object, while he gives his 
more direct attention to something nearer at hand. 
Miriam seemed now first to become aware of the 
silence that had followed upon the cheerful talk and 
laughter of a few moments before. 

"Looking round, she perceived that all her com- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 197 

pany of merry friends had retired, and Hilda, too, 
in whose soft and quiet presence she had always an 
indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and 
only herself and Donatello left hanging over the 
brow of the ominous precipice. 

"Not so, however ; not entirely alone ! In the base- 
ment wall of the palace, shaded from the moon, 
there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably 
once contained a statue ; not empty, either ; for a fig- 
ure now came forth from it and approached Miriam. 
She must have had cause to dread some unspeakable 
evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that 
this was the very crisis of her calamity; for, as he 
drew near, such a cold, sick despair crept over her, 
that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her natu- 
ral promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dream- 
ily to remem.ber falling on her knees; but, in her 
whole recollection of that wild moment, she beheld 
herself as in a dim show, and could not well distin- 
guish what was done and suffered; no, not even 
whether she were really an actor and sufferer in the 
scene. 

"Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from 
the sculptor, and turned back to rejoin her friend. 
At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her late 
companions, who were going down the cityward 
descent of the Capitoline Hill; they had set up a new 
stave of melody, in which her own soft voice, as well 
as the powerful sweetness of Miriam's, was sadly 
missed. 



198 HAWTHORNE 

"The door of the Httle court-yard had swung upon 
its hinges, and partly closed itself. Hilda (whose] 
native gentleness pervaded all her movements) was 
quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, 
by the noise of a struggle within, beginning and end- 
ing all in one breathless instant. Along with it, or 
closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful cry, w^hich 
quivered upward through the air, and sank quiver- 
ing downward to the earth. Then, a silence ! Poor 
Hilda had looked into the court-yard, and saw the 
whole quick passage of a deed, which took but that 
little time to grave itself in the eternal adamant. 

"The door of the court-yard swung slowly, and 
closed itself of its ow^n accord. Miriam and Dona- 
tello were now alone there. She clasped her hands, 
and looked wildly at the young man, whose form 
, seemed to have dilated, and whose eyes blazed with 
the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired him. It 
had kindled him into a man ; it had developed within 
him an intelligence which was no native characteris- 
tic of the Donatello whom we have heretofore 
known. But that simple and joyous creature was 
gone forever. 

" *What have you done ?^ said Miriam, in a hor- 
ror-stricken whisper. 

"The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's 
face, and now flashed out again from his eyes. 

" T did what ought to be done to a traitor !' he re- 
plied. T did what your eyes bade me do, when I 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 199 

asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the 
precipice T 

'These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. 
Could it be so ? Had her eyes provoked or assented 
to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas! 
looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene 
just acted, she could not deny — she was not sure 
whether it might be so, or no — that a wild joy had 
flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her perse- 
cutor in his mortal peril. Was it horror? — or ec- 
stasy? — or both in one? Be the emotion what it 
might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello 
flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, 
while his shriek went quivering downward. With 
the dead thump upon the stones below had come an 
unutterable horror. 

" 'And my eyes bade you do it T repeated she. 
'They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed 
downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treas- 
ure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable. On 
the pavement, below, was a dark mass, lying in a 
heap, with litde or nothing human in its appearance, 
except that the hands were stretched out, as if they 
might have clutched, for a moment, at the small 
square stones. But there was no motion in them 
now. Miriam watched the heap of mortality while 
she could count a hundred, which she took pains to 
do. No stir ; not a finger moved ! 

" 'You have killed him, Donatello ! He is quite 



200 HAWTHORNE 

dead!' said she. 'Stone dead! Would I were so, 
too!' 

" *Did you not mean that he should die?' sternly 
asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence 
which passion had developed in him. 'There was 
short time to weigh the matter ; but he had his trial 
in that breath or two while I held him over the cliff, 
and his sentence in that one glance, when your eyes 
responded to mine! Say that I have slain him 
against your will, — say that he died without your 
w^hole consent, — and, in another breath, you shall 
see me lying beside him.' 

** 'Oh, never !' cried Miriam. 'My one, own 
friend! Never, never, never!' 

"She turned to him, — the guilty, blood-stained, 
lonely woman, — she turned to her fellow-criminal, 
the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn 
into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her 
bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their 
two hearts together, till the horror and agony of 
each was combined into one emotion, and that a kind 
of rapture. 

" 'Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth !' said she ; 
*my heart consented to what you did. We two slew 
yonder wretch. The deed knots us together, for 
time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent !' 

"They threw one other glance at the heap of 
death below, to assure themselves that it was there ; 
so like a dream was the whole thing. Then they 
turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 201 

the court-yard, arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinc- 
tively, they were heedful not to sever themselves so 
much as a pace or two from one another, for fear 
of the terror and deadly chill that would thenceforth 
wait for them in solitude. Their deed — the crime 
which Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on 
the instant — had wreathed itself, as she said, like a 
serpent, in inextricable links about both their souls, 
and drew them into one, by its terrible contractile 
power. It was closer than a marriage-bond. So in- 
timate, in those first moments, was the union, that 
it seemed as if their new sympathy annihilated all 
other ties, and that they were released from the 
chain of humanity; a new sphere, a special law, had 
been created for them alone. The world could not 
come near them ; they were safe ! 

"When they reached the flight of steps leading 
downward from the Capitol, there was a far-off 
noise of singing and laughter. Swift, indeed, had 
been the rush of the crisis that was come and gone ! 
This was still the merriment of the party that had so 
recently been their companions. They recognized 
the voices which, a little while ago, had accorded 
and sung in cadence with their own. But they were 
familiar voices no more; they sounded strangely, 
and, as it were, out of the depths of space; so re- 
mote was all that pertained to the past life of these 
guilty ones, in the moral seclusion that had suddenly 
extended itself around them. But how close, and 
ever closer, did th^ breath of the immeasurable 



202 HAWTHORNE 

waste, that lay between them and all brotherhood or 
sisterhood, now press them one within the other ! 

" 'O friend !' cried Miriam, so putting her soul 
into the word that it took a heavy richness of mean- 
ing, and seemed never to have been spoken before, — 
*0 friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this com- 
panionship that knits our heart-strings together?' 

" 1 feel it, Miriam,' said Donatello. 'We draw 
one breath; we live one life !' 

" *Only yesterday,' continued Miriam ; 'nay, only 
u short half -hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude. 
No friendship, no sisterhood, could come near 
enough to keep the warmth within my heart. In an 
instant, all is changed ! There can be no more lone- 
liness !' 

" 'None, Miriam !' said Donatello. 

"'None, my beautiful one!' responded Miriam, 
gazing in his face, which had taken a higher, almost 
an heroic aspect, from the strength of passion. 
'None, my innocent one ! Surely, it is no crime that 
we have committed. One wretched and worthless 
life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives for 
evermore.* 

" 'For evermore, Miriam !' said Donatello ; 'ce- 
mented with his blood !' 

"The young man started at the word which he had 
himself spoken; it may be that it brought home, to 
the simplicity of his imagination, what he had not 
before dreamed of, — the ever-increasing loathsome- 
ness of a union that consists in guilt. Cemented 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 203 

with blood, which would corrupt and grow more 
noisome forever and forever, but bind them none the 
less strictly for that. 

" 'Forget it ! Cast it all behind you !' said Mir- 
iam, detecting, by her sympathy, the pang that was 
in his heart. The deed has done its office, and has 
no existence any more.' 

"They flung the past behind them, as she coun- 
selled, or else distilled from it a fiery intoxication, 
which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through 
those first moments of their doom. For, guilt has 
its moment of rapture, too. The foremost result of 
a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom. 
And thus there exhaled upward (out of their dark 
sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) 
a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair im- 
agined to be well worth the sleepy innocence that 
was forever lost to them. 

"As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of 
the occasion, they went onward, — not stealthily, not 
fearfully, — but with a stately gait and aspect. Pas- 
sion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) its brief 
nobility of carriage. They trod through the streets 
of Rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic 
and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, 
have haunted the blood-stained city. And, at Mir- 
iam's suggestion, they turned aside, for the sake of 
treading loftily past the old site of Pompey's Forum. 

" 'For there was a great deed done here !' she said, 
— "a deed of blood like ours ! Who knows, but we 



204 HAWTHORNE 

may meet the high and ever-sad fraternity of 
Caesar's murderers, and exchange a salutation?' 

" *Are they our brethren, now ?' asked Donatello. 

" *Yes; all of them,' said Miriam; 'and many an- 
other, whom the world little dreams of, has been 
made our brother or our sister, by what we have 
done within this hour !' 

"And, at the thought, she shivered. Where, then, 
was the seclusion, the remoteness, the strange, lone- 
some Paradise, into which she and her one compan- 
ion had been transported by their crime ? Was there, 
indeed, no such refuge, but only a crowded thor- 
oughfare and jostling throng of criminals? And 
was it true, that whatever hand had a blood-stain on 
it, — or had poured out poison, — or strangled a babe 
at its birth, — or clutched a grandsire's throat, he 
sleeping, and robbed him of his few last breaths, — 
had now the right to offer itself in fellowship w^ith 
their two hands ? Too certainly, that right existed. 
It is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong- 
doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and 
makes us, — who dreamed only of our own little sep- 
arate sin, — makes us guilty of the whole. And thus 
Miriam and her lover were not an insulated pair, 
but members of an innumerable confraternity of 
guilty ones, all shuddering at each other." 

The last paragraph, which points a curious inver- 
sion of the doctrine of the communion of the saints, 
is characteristically Hawthornesque. It is perverse, 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 205 

but a not unnatural offshoot of Puritan meditation, 
and reminds one of the grotesques sometimes found 
on cathedral churches. It contains, intellectually, 
the same sort of repugnance to the idea of sin that 
Hilda shows emotionally in her sensitive purity. A 
brotherhood of sinners is surely not, necessarily, the 
same as a brotherhood of devils; but, without dis- 
cussing the philosophy of this whim or fantasy of 
conscience on Miriam's part, it is enough to mark 
by it the depth of root that old New England 
thought had taken in this Arcadian soil of a long- 
lost Golden Age. The Puritan tone is noticeable in 
more than one phrase and sentiment, but in no one 
passage is the genuine moral nativity of the tale so 
plain as in this theory of the consubstantiality of 
guilt. It would be worthy of a capital place in an- 
cient metaphysic dogma. Here it is only a lurid 
thought at a moment of intense spiritual strain; but 
in its most imaginative and least theologic form it 
defines Hawthorne's essential Puritanism and illus- 
trates how fundamental such thought was in the 
workings of his imagination. 

One turns happily from this nightmare of a fev- 
ered and guilty conscience to the pleasant idyl, 
where Donatello in his misery turns to call the dear, 
woodland companions of his boyhood, if, perchance, 
they will know his changed voice : 

" T used to make many strange acquaintances ; 
for, from my earliest childhood, I was familiar with 



206 HAWTHORNE 

whatever creatures haunt the woods. You would 
have laughed to see the friends I had among them ; 
yes, among the wild, nimble things, that reckon man 
their deadliest enemy ! How it was first taught me, 
I cannot tell; but there was a charm — a voice, a 
murmur, a kind of chant — by which I called the 
woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the 
feathered people, in a language that they seemed to 
tuiderstand.' 

" *I have heard of such a gift,' responded the 
sculptor, gravely, *but never before met with a per- 
son endowed with it. Pray, try the charm ; and lest 
I should frighten your friends away, I will with- 
draw into this thicket, and merely peep at them.' 

" *I doubt,' said Donatello, 'whether they will re- 
member my voice now. It changes, you know, as 
the boy grows towards manhood.' 

"Nevertheless, as the young Count's good-nature 
and easy persuasibility were among his best charac- 
teristics, he set about complying with Kenyon's re- 
quest. The latter, in his concealment among the 
shrubberies, heard him send forth a sort of modu- 
lated breath, wild, rude, yet harmonious. It struck 
the auditor as at once the strangest and the most 
natural utterance that had ever reached his ears. 
Any idle boy, it should seem, singing to himself and 
setting his wordless song to no other or more defi- 
nite tune than the play of his own pulses, might pro- 
duce a sound almost identical with this; and yet, it 
was as individual as a murmur of the breeze. Dona- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 207 

tello tried it, over and over again, with many breaks, 
at first, and pauses of uncertainty; then with more 
confidence, and a fuller swell, like a wayfarer grop- 
ing out of obscurity into the light, and moving with 
freer footsteps as it brightens around him. 

"Anon, his voice appeared to fill the air, yet not 
with an obtrusive clangor. The sound was of a 
murmurous character, soft, attractive, persuasive, 
friendly. The sculptor fancied that such might 
have been the original voice and utterance of the 
natural man, before the sophistication of the human 
intellect formed what we now call language. In 
this broad dialect — broad as the sympathies of na- 
ture — the human brother might have spoken to his 
inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the woods, or 
soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible to 
such an extent as to vv^in their confidence. 

"The sound had its pathos, too. At some of its 
simple cadences, the tears came quietly into Ken- 
yon's eyes. They welled up slowly from his heart, 
which was thrilling with an emotion more delight- 
ful than he had often felt before, but which he for- 
bore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it should at once 
perish in his grasp. 

"Donatello paused two or three times, and seemed 
to listen; then, recommencing, he poured his spirit 
and life more earnestly into the strain. And, finally, 
— or else the sculptor's hope and imagination de- 
ceived him, — soft treads were audible upon the 
fallen leaves. There was a rustling among the 



208 HAWTHORNE 

shrubbery; a whirr of wings, moreover, that hov- 
ered in the air. It may have been all an illusion; 
but Kenyon fancied that he could distinguish the 
stealthy, cat-like movement of some small forest 
citizen, and that he could even see its doubtful 
shadow, if not really its substance. But, all at once, 
w^hatever might be the reason, there ensued a hur- 
ried rush and scamper of little feet; and then the 
sculptor heard a wild, sorrowful cry, and through 
the crevices of the thicket beheld Donatello fling 
himself on the ground." 

This is a true glimpse of the "early world." The 
tale is exquisitely told. The pathos of it is as natu- 
ral as a catch in the throat. But the skepticism of 
Hawthorne toward his own imagination, which has 
often been commented on above, is obvious. He 
describes the scene ; he creates the illusion ; but, like 
a teller of stories to children, he can not refrain from 
the reminder that it may be all make-believe. Is 
matter-of-fact indeed so precious in art? Yet, for 
all his caution, the heart rallies to its own creations, 
its own illusions, it may be, and insists, for the mo- 
ment, at least, on the truth of the vision. Dona- 
tello's grief that he can not call the squirrels, and 
other "nimble creatures," — and every woodsman 
knows that there is a call which brings them near 
and friendly, — this grief is a fable of the rift that 
conscience discloses between innocence and experi- 
ence; something is lost with the passing years be- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 209 

side *'the splendor in the grass" and "the glory in 
the flower ;" and it is this inner and mystic loss, this 
bereavement, as it were, that is shadowed forth in 
Donatello's cry. Fanciful as the scene and the inci- 
dent may seem to some, in its essence the myth, if 
myth it be, rings true to the heart of all. If the 
faun in Donatello received his death-wound in the 
murder scene, it was here in the wood that he died. 
Here the "early world" passed out of Donatello's 
life, as it passes out of the life of all men whom 
life matures; and the truth is well enough set forth 
imaginatively by this simple and beautiful Arcadian 
fable of Donatello's call. 

The visible charm and romantic emotion — w^hat 
one may call the literary fascination — of these three 
passages, is obvious. Hawthorne was at the height 
of his power of representation and grace of descrip- 
tion when he penned them. The golden and mel- 
low glow, as of an American autumn, that pervades 
Irving's ripe literary years and often transforms 
Hawthorne's style into a sort of dreamland of the 
imagination, rests like a haze on Monte Beni and its 
shadowy valleys leading down to Rome. The per- 
fection of it, as the woof of imaginative feeling and 
verbal art, is undeniable; and the flash of Italian 
landscapes and scenes completes the spell. But, 
ethically, to keep attention fixed on the moral talc 
involved in this picturesque web of material fact, 
artistic tradition and spiritual speculation, the final 
impression is of mystery. Mystery is, indeed, a per- 



210 HAWTHORNE 

manent element in Hawthorne's mood of thought, 
and sometimes it degenerates into the merely uncer- 
tain, the unexplained or the fanciful. This lower 
form of mystery occurs in the romance repeatedly; 
it is plain enough in the untold story of Miriam and 
the model and in the untold after-life of Miriam 
and Donatello, neither of which seems logically con- 
nected with the plot, though linked with it tempo- 
rarily; there are always things left thus in the 
penumbra of life or stories. But the mystery, which 
is impressed on the mind, in the moral conduct of 
the tale in its essence, is the age-old mystery of evil 
in the world and its contact, by chance or fate, 
with innocent lives, together with its results in the 
destinies and the nature of its victims. This was a 
problem of native attraction to the New England 
romancer; he had changed his climate, but not his 
mind. He assumed the state of innocence or of na- 
ture, which he made identical, and he brought that 
world in contact with evil in the form of a crime 
which he interpreted as sin ; and he undertook to tell 
the reactions that took place in the persons con- 
cerned. He dealt with an artificial world, in both 
instances, and dreamed his dream with such aid as 
speculation could give him. Perhaps there was 
more poetic fantasy than moral reality in his medi- 
tation; but, however that may be, it is not for any 
light he throws on the divine mystery of the soul's 
life that one reads the tale. 

It must be acknowledged that, for all its adven- 



I 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 211 

tures into the spiritual realm, the novel has made 
its way mostly, certainly in later years, as a tourist's 
companion, or better kind of guide-book, to give 
.feeling and perspective to the ramblings of foreign- 
ers in the hill country of Italy and to make "a Ro- 
man holiday." Its vivid presentation of the scene 
and background, as a mere book of travel, with its 
myriad almost photographic touches, recommend it 
to the eye that looks on Italy for the first time, and 
with a sight half of memory of what has been told 
and expectation of what shall be, as well as of ac- 
tuality. It fulfills the early dream and prepares for 
the greater vision. Hawthorne was so uncommonly 
good a sight-seer and narrator, and also a bit of a 
visionary, that his description of Italian scenes, 
where he always had subjects equal to his powers, 
is a masterpiece of realism with the unseen light in 
it. His artistic predilections and associations, also, 
which brought him, both temperamentally and so- 
cially, into sympathy with paintings and statues 
and gardens, however amateurish and initiatory his 
comments and enthusiasms may seem to a more 
sophisticated generation, enabled him to give an ap- 
pearance of wholeness to his rendering of Italian 
life, as a tourist sees it. He included in his imagi- 
native survey of the land an uncommon amount and 
variety of mere information, — sights, objects, as- 
pects, customs and persons, the medley of the world 
of foreign travel; and this gives another interest to 
the tale, quite separate from that of the spiritual 



212 HAWTHORNE 

story involved. What history is to the ordinary 
historical novel, that travel is to this romance. In 
particular, the talk, if it may be so designated, about 
the Roman sights, the Church of the Capuchins, the 
portrait of the Cenci, the painting of St. Michael, 
and the confessional and the carnival, is interesting, 
wholly apart from Donatello and the pitiful history 
of his inner life and tragic fortune. In so pictur- 
esque a world, with such manifold and fascinating 
vistas and horizons of time, myth and natural 
beauty, it seems to matter little what takes place; 
the scene more than the action absorbs attention; 
it is Rome, not Donatello, that holds the eye. 

This over-balance of the surroundings and atmos- 
phere of the story, in comparison with its human 
narrative, is evident. The tale is read for its acci- 
dents, so to speak, rather than for its substance. 
Yet, without regard to the spiritual history of Dona- 
tello, the characters are more interesting, person- 
ally, than is common with Hawthorne, sharper and 
more massive. Ordinarily, there is something thin 
and fragile, unsubstantial, in the sense his characters 
give of themselves, — a water-color effect, as it were; 
Miriam, Donatello, Hilda, — and, somewhat re- 
moved, Kenyon — seem like a marble group. Per- 
haps, the name — The Marble Faun — is partly re- 
sponsible for this impression, — the name and the 
thing; but, besides, there is a certain immobility in 
the figures, — they seem always posed. Even, when 
most in action, as in the sylvan dance and the un- 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 213 

easy movement after the murder, they recall the 
motion of bas-reliefs more than the freedom of life. 
The continuous artistic effect, as of posing, results 
from the fewness of the characters, which are al- 
ways identical and in simple relations, and their 
singleness is only the more emphasized, when they 
are seen against larger and nameless groups, as in 
the sylvan dance, with the strollers of the murder- 
scene, or in the square at Perugia beneath the bronze 
pontiff's benediction. 

There is great definiteness of outline to the four 
characters; and yet, it is singular how little one 
knows about them. Miriam is like a visitor from 
another world, without origin or destiny. She is, 
from her entrance, infinitely more mature than 
Donatello and she continues to give this impression 
of a being out of his sphere, even to the end, by 
virtue of her experience; their partnership in crime 
does not really unite them as equal mates. She was, 
from the first, a w^oman, and he was a boy, to whom 
experience came as a catastrophe and with illumina- 
tion, no doubt ; but he remained a boy at heart, how- 
ever saddened and wise, with the dark mortal knowl- 
edge. It is a trait of Hawthorne's work in creation 
that his characters show little substantial change in 
nature, however much their situations alter. Are 
not the characters of The Scarlet Letter essen- 
tially the same at the close as at the beginning of 
the tale? Their experience has passed over them, 
and changed the circumstances, but are they changed 



214 HAWTHORNE 

in any distinguishable way, except that they are 
older in the lore of life? Miriam belongs to a spe- 
cific and peculiar type of womanhood, that Haw- 
thorne repeatedly tried to present, — the same type 
as Hester and Zenobia. A richer nature, a more 
massive physique, that something "oriental," as it is 
described, characterized these women in general, and 
set them over against the normal New England type, 
delicate, fragile, paler, which Hilda, Priscilla, and 
the unnamed frail woman of the crowd in the Puri- 
tan romance reflected. The line between the two 
types is almost racial, so definite is the contrast of 
opposites; or, if not quite opposites, then aliens. 

It is singular to observe that the stronger, richer, 
more generous physical type seems the more human. 
Hilda, though set forth as the very apotheosis of the 
virginal, there in the tower with her doves, and again 
in her instinctive revolt at the mere knowledge of 
evil, and her refusal of it, in the incident of the con- 
fessional, where she freed herself from the pollution 
and dismay that the knowledge had been to her, — 
Hilda, with all her sensitiveness to the shock within 
her own nature, shows a hardness of virtue that re- 
minds the reader of the "unco' guid." Would she, un- 
der any circumstances, have been capable of seeing 
Donatello with Miriam's eyes? As little as of win- 
ning his love, one thinks. The two women are poles 
apart. Whence came Hawthorne's breadth of view, 
and especially this continually reappearing woman 
of the stronger and richer, and, one must add, more 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 215 

unrestrained nature? Knowledge of the realities of 
life was with them, more than with their paler sis- 
ters, he seems to say. In The Marble Faun, at 
least, true knowledge was with Miriam and Dona- 
tello, however much the conventional counsel of 
Kenyon, at his leave-taking to go to the rescue of 
Hilda, might look like wisdom, and, indeed, an ele- 
vated form of it. Kenyon, indeed, is colorless, a 
mere mouthpiece to fill out the play. 

Hawthorne's success, as is readily seen, is usually 
greater with his female than with his male charac- 
ters. Neither Arther Dimmesdale nor Roger Chil- 
lingworth is really interesting, and toward Hol- 
lingsworth one feels social repugnance. Donatello 
is a bright exception to the somewhat heavy villains 
of the Hawthornesque stage. He is, in fact, a lov- 
able creature, and fitted to his Arcadian environ- 
ment like a beautiful animal to the woods and pas- 
tures, but his fascination is wholly human; kind, 
gentle, joyous, a devoted lover with the light spirits 
of youth, it was ill fortune for him when the shad- 
ows of Rome and of life fell across his native sun- 
shine. His crime is so swiftly accomplished, so 
vaguely motived, so unreflecting, that it does not 
alienate him, in the least, from the natural affection 
which he has already elicited from the reader. It 
is hard to believe that it is a real crime that has been 
seen, and not a mere nightmare of fancy. The 
crime is not sufficiently rooted in evil to have the 
effect attributed to it, one thinks, in remorse and in 



216 HAWTHORNE 

revelation of the spiritual nature. . It is here that the 
abstract element in Hawthorne's imagined situation 
fails to carry conviction. It may be admitted in 
theory that out of experience of sin a soul may 
come to self -consciousness, and in that sense be born, 
but it is not plain that Donatello's wild act was of 
a sort to serve as a true type of sin; and in abstract 
art conviction of the universality of the instance 
given must be perfect. Casuistry has too large a 
field in this case. Still less satisfactory is the ac- 
count of his remorse, repentance and absolution, if 
such there were. The history of the crime and its 
spiritual consequences is too fragmentary, too 
slightly made out and defined, to make the *'trans- 
formation" of Donatello much more than a form of 
words. He remains, in his alleged transformation, 
much the same in nature as before, so far as visible 
signs go, except it is a lovable nature seen in shadow 
instead of in light. He has not forfeited good-will. 
One is sorry for what has befallen him, but with 
the pity that one feels for suffering that is not un- 
derstood by its victim, and with sympathy that 
abides in the memory. This is not the story of a 
new fall of man, nor anything like it; nor is it a 
new gospel of that fall; it is a tale, on the contrary, 
not very well made out, so far as it lies in the spir- 
itual realm of the history of the soul's birth and pil- 
grimage. 

But the case is far different with the earthly scene 
and circumstances of the story. One almost calls it 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 217 

a myth, because it has so lovely an investiture for 
its moral doctrines, and lies so near, on the one hand, 
to the tradition of the Golden Age, and, on the 
other, to Roman classical remains. It has been 
much used in Italy by the transient resident or trav- 
eler, because of its sympathetic and contemplative 
description of places and things. It rivals Childe 
Harold, which is now old-fashioned, for such use, 
and it is much more practical. Corinne and Stend- 
hal are quite out of date. The Marble Faun is 
a w^ork of the same utility as these for a more mod-, 
ern and differently bred traveler than the gentlemen 
of a century ago. It contains an introduction to the 
visible land ; and it prepares the mind, as well as the 
eye, for the scene. Its function has been even wider 
and perhaps of greater value as an element in Amer- 
ican culture, to the untraveled, inasmuch as it has 
spread before them a vision of "delectable moun- 
tains" they may never traverse, and embodied for 
them the Italian dream. Hawthorne had both the 
seeing and the dreaming eye, and both are needful 
for the sight of Italy. Through his pellucid narra- 
tive there runs the mirage, charm mixes with real- 
ity on his page, there is the same uncertainty 
w^hether this is life or dream, that his w^ork not in- 
frequently gives ; and this fits the Italian scene. The 
landscape and persons of his story, as he builds them 
up imaginatively, have something of the character 
of an emanation rather than of real substance, that 
something diaphanous characteristic of the imagi- 



218 HAWTHORNE 

nary in New England at that time, not quite phan- 
tasmal and not quite flesh and blood. The imagi- 
nary Italian scene, both in its figures and its look, 
in Hawthorne's tale, is, really, mythical, to describe 
it most appropriately; and it is in the atmosphere of 
that world that he presents the realities of the land, 
its squares and churches and crowds, its pictures 
and statues. So admirably has he thrown this air 
about all he touches that scarce any romance seems 
so timeless. Donatello, by his very conception, puts 
time to flight, and the Italy against which his figure 
is relieved is eternal Italy. It is this Italy, where 
myths seem real, that Hawthorne brought home to 
his countrymen's apprehension. 

It is obvious how near this romance was, by its 
realism, to the actual scene, and, by its idealism, to 
art, and thus doubly to Italy. It had the easy par- 
ticularism of the one and the universality t)f the 
other. In both ways it succeeded, as a book of 
travel and as an idealization of an idylhc world, pre- 
human in spirit, evolving into the sad world of uni- 
versal experience, the human world; only, in this 
second phase, the Puritanic elements in the trans- 
formation — elements of hereditary thought in Haw- 
thorne — fail to carry conviction of their reality. To 
speak in the language of the schools, there is no 
true "katharsis," that is, no manifest purification 
and elimination of the sorrowful evil that had be- 
fallen, no absolution, but the characters are left 
struggling in the coil that had involved them, with 



THE NEW ENGLANDER ABROAD 219 

a rather sternly expressed charge that they endure 
their fate in a penitential mood. The Puritan solu- 
tion does not end the tragedy; that is the fauU. It 
follows naturally, for the human heart is sound, 
that the preferred parts of the story are the travel 
scenes and the myth of Donatello in the days of his 
golden youth,— the Italian parts. The tragedy it- 
self belongs to the thought and temper of a sterner 
and darker land,— that old New England, out of 
which Hawthorne's genius was originally taken, like 
some great gray boulder of that soil, which, despite 
its weight of wood-flowers and ferns and occasional 
sun-gleams under the pines, shadows the hillside. 



CHAPTER VII 



CONCLUSION 



IT was Hawthorne's pleasant but somewhat futile 
habit to wind up his novels with a short chapter, 
in which, before dismissing his characters to their 
unrecorded fates, he vaguely indicated their various 
fortunes in the great world. It would be similarly 
pleasant, but equally futile, no doubt, for the critic 
to attempt to gather the wandering strands of his 
comment on such a miscellany as Hawthorne's 
works constitute, and so set forth some outline 
sketch, at least, of as eminent a genius as American 
annals contain, before bidding him farewell. 
A genius, however, like his books, has fates of his 
own that no criticism can much deflect, even for the 
period of current taste. It is to be suspected that, 
even at the present time, Hawthorne has ceased to 
be judged by the standards of contemporary popu- 
lar taste and is most valued for that appeal his writ- 
ings in general make to a communal regard and af- 
fection for the things, the ways and the people of 
the old time. He embodies the age he lived in and 
many memories of the "times before," and this is 
his hold — to a certain extent a sentimental hold — on 
the generation that succeeded him, and is now pass- 
ing. On the other hand, he is hardly yet come to be 

220 



CONCLUSION 221 

judged by the canons of pure taste and timeless art 
which finally decide a nation's classics ; in any case, 
when established, they appeal to but a few in each 
age, though they are long-lived; true fame is the 
breath of long-past time. It is plain, however, that 
he was one of the greater writers of his own age; 
and it is as a writer of his age, a contemporary 
writer, that he has been viewed in this volume. 

The contemporaneous element in his writings, 
both in their subject-matter and their feeling, is so 
large as almost to place him, at first sight, among 
provincial authors, w^hose fame lies in the success 
with which they describe and present the life of 
their own locality. Each section of the older parts 
of the country had its native romancer to celebrate 
the scenes and historic episodes of the soil; and, 
with the course of time, the newer parts have given 
rise to fiction or poetry with the tang of their own 
earth. The Creoles, the Argonauts, the Hoosiers, 
have each a historian of manners, if not a Homer. 
The strongly marked and picturesque characteris- 
tics of the early settlements over all the continent 
are thus preserved in literary beginnings. A litera- 
ture, close to the soil, whose pride it is to be strictly 
limited to *'the business and bosoms" of its own 
people, is often highly extolled; in late years it has 
been a mere incident of nationalist movements; and, 
if those who maintain in literature the separatist 
principle of nationality are right, then the provin- 
cialism that Hawthorne, at first sight, displays is 



222 HAWTHORNE 

only a badge of genius and proclaims him a true 
master. Boston has often been compared, as re- 
spects its literary status, to Edinburgh. Under the 
theory which has been mentioned, New England lit- 
erature would be, in regard to English, a colonial 
product, of marked vigor and interesting traits, but 
set off by itself and to be appreciated mainly by its 
own folk. 

The first impression given by Hawthorne's work 
in general is, no doubt, of its strong local character. 
It not only presents the local scene, but it smacks of 
the soil in thought and sentiment. Its New Eng- 
landism is a matter, too, of the history it enshrines, 
and the idealism it illustrates. The whole literature 
of the northeastern coast, however, in respect to that 
of the rest of the country, gains distinction by its 
comparative remoteness in time, and especially be- 
cause, in consequence of its early date, it neighbored 
the main stream of English letters, and drew from 
that great tradition; the mellow accent of the 
eighteenth century fell golden from its lips in the 
new world. It was not merely graces of verbal style 
that it remembered and absorbed ; there was a style 
of thought, as well as of words, in Goldsmith and his 
comrades and elders that had not yet found obHvion 
when the first native authors and their immediate 
successors began to wTite. It was this afterglow 
of a great classical age in the colonial sky which 
most distinguished the acknowledged American 
masters of the earlier part of the nineteenth century 



CONCLUSION 223 

from later pioneers of literature in the country at 
large. Hawthorne was one of those who profited 
most by the olden tradition, and most continued it. 
He had from it his literary descent and breeding. 
The old English culture which he absorbed in lit- 
erary tradition, however remote from its old home, 
added something to the local character of his work, 
which differentiated it and gave it larger citizenship 
in the world. The presence of this is most obvious, 
perhaps, in his style. 

Hawthorne's style has been much commented on. 
It is not capable of any simple analysis, for it in- 
volves much more than the mere graces of expres- 
sion, and, indeed, flows rather from that style of 
thought w^hich has just been mentioned as an inward 
thing above expression. This is no more, perhaps, 
than to say, as of old, "the style is the man." Such 
style as Hawthorne's has nothing rhetorical about it ; 
it is a grace of character. What is dwelt on here 
more particularly, however, is that, if by his birth 
he shared something communal with his society, and 
was by virtue of that a provincial author, he also by 
his genius shared in the great tradition of English 
literature, — that tradition of serious character, 
sweet speech and a certain elevation of tone, that 
harmonized well with his Puritan blood and made 
him a great master of the English tongue. This 
literary breeding was, indeed, the common culture 
of his time; but he appropriated it with a sympathetic 
genius of such power as to distinguish his work 



224 HAWTHORNE 

above others for those excellencies which were most 
valued in that culture. The conspicuous quality of 
his style is a wonderful purity of tone. It is the 
dominance of this, together with the constant pres- 
ence of the imaginative world, that establishes his 
characteristic atmosphere ; no American writer works 
so habitually in the artistic element. His page is bro- 
ken by an occasional freak of humor or fancy ; it is 
full of kindly feeling, of a certain neighborliness of 
mind; for all its gloom, sunshine lies warm on it, 
and friendliness pervades it. But, apart from any 
human quality, the style Is the still and pellucid at- 
mosphere through which his scenes are beheld, as 
with all the masters of English. 

Heredity was strong in Hawthorne, as it is gen- 
erally observed to be in men of literary genius; but 
it would be misleading to think of his inheritance as 
narrowly local, a matter of village things; it was 
also broadly intellectual, the patrimony of his peo- 
ple. He drew his subject and his spirit from the 
land — and, indeed, one may say, from the province 
— of his birth; but his art — the real home of his 
genius — was more universal. In like fashion, too, 
the conception of his realism, a primary trait in his 
earlier work and a distinguished feature of his 
novels, should be enlarged. With that keen obser- 
vation, habitual with him from the beginning, he 
saw the object, whatever it was, clearly, and repre- 
sented exactly even its minute and transitory as- 
pects; but he saw it, as he saw history also, en- 



1 



CONCLUSION 225 

swathed in sentiment. The case is somewhat hke 
that of realism in the pastoral, where facts are seen 
plainly and often with a minuteness that seems tri- 
fling, but through a medium of artistic feeling. It is 
realism, as it were, at one remove. So Hawthorne 
saw the native landscape — rocks and woods and sea 
and the things of the farm and road — realistically 
indeed, but Avith a certain home- feeling, instinctive 
and unconscious in him, yet characteristic of his 
people and his race, — saw it through the sentiment 
of home; the habit, which was to him as his natural 
breath, has, to a later generation, something almost 
reminiscent in it; and the home-sentiment, which it 
originally embodied, becomes, especially to those 
who have long left the land, the sentiment for the 
past. One can hardly overestimate this element in 
Hawthorne's fascination. 

The manner of his approach to local history, 
whether in its actual or imaginative form, is similar. 
It is not the mere historical fact that he presents, as 
an annalist might do, or any writer interested only 
in the specific truth ; but he shows it, as he sees it him- 
self, through the sentiment of patriotism. This is 
conspicuous in some of the colonial tales. The 
home-sentiment under some form of local pride is 
pervasive in his work. It is as fundamental in the 
novels, though under a different phase, as in the leg- 
ends of the early champions of New England liberty. 
It is through the strength of this element in his fic- 
tion, especially, that he came to be the imaginative 



226 HAWTHORNE 

historian of the original New England folk and the 
Puritanism in which their communal life was con- 
centrated. In his novels he set forth the spirit of his 
people, his "little clan" ; no one but a son of the soil 
could have done it as he did it, viewing imagina- 
tively their historic life, just as he looked on their 
familiar fields and pastures, through a sentiment 
born of his nativity. It was this sentiment which 
gave antique charm to The House of the Seven 
Gables, religious intensity to The Scarlet Letter 
and moral meaning to The Marble Faun. Under- 
lying each of these novels was a communal inher- 
itance, a historic unity of Instinct, feeling and expe- 
rience. They were not mere inventions of an idle 
day, but in them Hawthorne gave voice to the great- 
est realities his people had found. What had begun 
with him as local history ended as ideal romance; 
but the basis and origin of all alike lay in his orig- 
inal attachment to his own soil, a profound New 
England feeling, an instinct, he himself calls it, an- 
other form, in fact, of the sentiment of home, but 
with power upon a whole people instead of an indi- 
vidual. It was the fulness with which he expressed 
and obeyed this sentiment, both in his choice of sub- 
ject and his method of treatment, that made him the 
most representative writer of New England. He 
showed It forth, not only as a land, but as a people. 
Such modifications by the sentiment of home and 
country as give emotional value to landscape and 
history are initiatory stages to the pure illusions of 



CONCLUSION 227 

art; they are a part of the process of making an art- 
ist. The bare fact becomes malleable and changes 
in significance. An emotional treatment of land- 
scape, an imaginative and especially a dramatic 
treatment of history are common, and it is under- 
stood that they recreate their object. It has been 
advised, indeed, on the highest authority of the 
schools, that history should be so adapted to the 
imagination on the score of the economy of inven- 
tion thus obtained, both in conception and feeling. It 
was Shakespeare's method in many of his plays. It 
is usually essential to success, however, that in a 
drama history should be very ductile, — indeed, pref- 
erably a myth. The advantage to Hawthorne in 
using Puritanism as a background is obvious, in that 
he easily secured attention. The same gain is gen- 
erally aimed at in the historical novel of any period. 
It belongs to the historical novel that it should have 
solid fact for its substance and attract the reader 
by this circumstance as well as for other rea- 
sons. It may well be doubted, however, in view of 
the career of that type of novel in the last century, 
whether history is, in any high degree, a preserva- 
tive element in literature. Even in the capital case 
of Sir Walter Scott, the unrivaled master of his- 
torical fiction, the permanent hold of his books on 
the world, outside Scotland, is matter of specula- 
tion. The historical substance is local and temporal, 
— essentially mortal ; it is a weight that the imagina- 
tive and purely Hterary qualities of the book must 



228 HAWTHORNE 

carry in the race with time. Such novels will re- 
tain their interest so long as the history they em- 
body is interesting either to the nation described or 
to the world; later, in proportion as they are exact 
renderings of the customs and atmosphere of the 
times they represent, they will be consulted and read 
mainly by persons of an antiquarian habit. Puritan- 
ism, the historical element in Hawthorne's work, 
will long preserve it in his own land, as being a past 
phase of a land proud and reminiscent of its past; 
but for preservation in the larger world, his work 
must depend on something more than its historical 
appeal. 

To turn again to the case of pastoral poetry and 
its treatment of landscape and human life, it sees 
the real, as was said above, at one remove, as it 
were, through a special atmosphere, as Hawthorne 
saw his native New England, whether land or peo- 
ple, through a sentiment. The pastoral, to put it 
briefly, sees the world through the universal ele- 
ments of beauty and of love with w^hich it sur- 
rounds and fills the scene. What it sees is, there- 
fore, for the eyes of all the world, beauty and love 
being universal principles. Hawthorne, as his 
genius matured, seized on the universal moral prin- 
ciple, and saw human life and destiny in the world 
through that. His Puritan origin led him to mark 
mainly the shadows in the scene, — that is, the op- 
eration of evil rather than good; this accounts for 
the predominant impression of gloom one receives 



n 



CONCLUSION 229 

from his work, though in fact there is abundant sun- 
shine in it. The main hues, however, are tragic, 
pessimistic, hopeless. In so far as evil and its prob- 
lems are a universal aspect of life, his work makes 
a universal appeal. He thus exceeds his province 
by virtue of his moral subject ; but he treats his sub- 
ject with genius, and it is not the subject but the 
genius that makes him great. He treated it under 
the pure illusions of art. 

The type of pure illusion in imaginative art is the 
Shakespearean ideal drama. Here reality, in the 
sense of the local and temporal, is refined away ; the 
scene involves no special time or place or persons. 
It is a great feat for the imagination to spare such 
aid. Imagination was Hawthorne's prime faculty; 
but it freed its wings slowly for a long flight. The 
House of the Seven Gables is always near to Sa- 
lem; but The Scarlet Letter is far less provincial 
than it seems, and The Marble Faun at times seems 
to forget its New England origin. The Scarkt 
Letter is not only an episode of Puritanism, it is 
universal tragedy; and The Marble Faun is half 
a pastoral, and all in an ideal land of its own. The 
quality of Hawthorne's imagination is hardly ap- 
preciated. He was a master of pure illusion, and 
held a magician's wand that commanded the regions 
"out of space, out of time," with uncommon power. 
No other American foot has entered the charmed 
circle where Donatello appeared. Indeed, as has 
been indicated, Hawthorne could scarcely believe 



230 HAWTHORNE 

his own magic. Again and again he questions the 
workings of his own imagination, as if he were pos- 
sessed by a questioning spirit, a Mephistopheles of 
the modern mind. "Did the scarlet letter burn in 
the sky?" is a typical query; but, believe the portent 
or not, the dreaming faculty — the creative instinct 
having its will — went on, and again with the wiz- 
ard's curse, and again with Donatello in the wood. 
Genius, like love, "finds out its way." Hawthorne 
approached art through those universal principles 
that underlie it — characteristically, the moral prin- 
ciple, — whose issue is the tragic ; but his imagination 
was also master of gentler spells. 

In the work of genius of so high a quality and so 
pure an action, it is natural to observe more closely 
its particular operation in its several tasks, in those 
points of execution commonly examined in the case 
of great genius. There is generally more of growth 
than of deliberate intention in such works. Plots, 
in creation, it is to be suspected, are apt to find their 
own climaxes ; but it is interesting to see where they 
occur and to notice their effect, both in the action 
and on the author. The Scarlet Letter reaches its 
climax in the apparition of the letter in the sky, if 
it may be so described ; in The House of the Seven 
Gables the point where the story turns is the inci- 
dent of the judge's death, and in The Marble Faun 
the critical event is the murder. In each case 
the tragic reversal occurs at the place mentioned, in 
the emblazonment in the sky of the minister's se- 



CONCLUSION 231 

cret sin, in the fulfillment of the ancestral curse in 
its last instance, and in Donatello's change of nature. 
There is a sub-plot, also, in the plan for escape in 
the first, and in the story of Alice and the myth of 
the nymph in the other two cases; but it is feeble 
and negligible, the plan being abortive and the two 
brief legends mere reduplications of the main idea. 
The climax, or reversal, is followed by an explana- 
tory incident, emphasizing what has occurred, in the 
public confession of the minister and in Donatello's 
grief in the wood, when the wild creatures do not 
answer to his call; and the flight of the brother and 
sister from the old house is, essentially, the first step 
in the dissolution of the curse and the freeing of 
the plot. It is noticeable that, in all these cases, the 
climax with its single pendant incident is the virtual 
end of the main story; after it occurs the later fates 
of Hawthorne's characters do not interest him; this 
is true even in Donatello's case, for he ceases to be 
prominent after the scene in the wood, and, in fact, 
drops out of the tale, except as a flitting figure. 
This, In the main, is because Hawthorne was inter- 
ested in the idea and not in the persons of the 
particular tale. The quality of human sympathy, 
however, is strongly evident in the romance of old 
Salem, and what may be called creative sympathy — 
the sympathy of an author for his own creations — is 
manifest especially in the Roman tale. 

It is plain that Hawthorne's interest did not lie in 
the logical development of a single action, the true 



232 HAWTHORNE 

strength of plot. It was not dramatic interest ex- 
cept incidentally; primarily, it was psychological, 
— an interest, not in action, but in states of mind, 
and, particularly, the recoil of action on the mind. 
This is normally a state of suffering, and a basis of 
tragic emotion. It is a fascinating field for the 
psychologist with a dramatic instinct. It lends itself 
more readily to scenes, phases, indirect expression, 
repetition and meditation than the straightforward 
evolution of a single action would allow; and, as a 
matter of fact, Hawthorne does not so much develop 
an action as illustrate an idea. His method in doing 
this is most characteristically described as mosaic- 
work. He gathers together his materials from 
various quarters and combines them into a har- 
monious and brilliant composite that makes his ro- 
mance a succession of scenes only loosely connected. 
In a novel this is not so injurious as it would be in 
a drama; for the end of a dramatist is to portray an 
action, but a novelist has many ends. Hawthorne's 
purpose was to portray human nature under various 
aspects, — mainly of suffering; and he set it forth, 
not primarily through the acts, but through the men- 
tal moods of his characters. But, when all allowance 
has been made for the psychological interest and 
eclectic method of Hawthorne, close analysis un- 
doubtedly leaves the conviction that his work is 
structurally weak in its greater examples. 

The impression of some lack of structural vigor 
in Hawthorne's genius is confirmed, if one looks at 



CONCLUSION 233 

the history of his artistic method. His early use of 
the physical object as a symbol has been sufficiently 
described. It served him well, and its development 
in his practise is interesting; but he exhausted it in 
The Scarlet Letter, and in The Marble Faun 
he was obliged to break it up, so to speak, and dis- 
tribute its function among several objects. Symbol- 
ism of this sort properly issues in mysticism as a 
habit of thought; but Hawthorne was not a mystic. 
On the contrary, he shared the temperament of his 
age of reform and was skeptical in his mental mood. 
The miscellaneous matter and eclectic habit of his 
imagination are best illustrated by the group of his 
unfinished posthumous tales, where he had not yet 
coordinated and harmonized the various elements 
into one narrative. It would seem that his long 
practise in the short story had so habituated him to 
its restrictions and its opportunities that he did not 
fully gain the larger freedom of the longer form; his 
romances tend to be a series of scenic tableaux, each 
singly impressive, and in them he is in other ways 
frequently reminiscent of his early manner. In 
other words, he never developed an artistic method 
so appropriate to the romance as the symbolism of 
the physical image was to the brief tale of imagina- 
tion. 

But despite what critical deductions may be made 
on the score of structure and method as applied in 
the novels, Hawthorne's conspicuous excellencies 
^re richly illustrated in their progress, and charac- 



234 HAWTHORNE 

terize the longer works more brilliantly than they do 
the tales where they appear on a smaller scale. De- 
signs on a small scale, indeed, favored the qualities 
of his genius in some ways; but these brief and con- 
densed scenes were more effective when grouped 
than when taken singly. The vividness and vigor, 
the harmony of the elements, the exquisite finish, 
are characteristic of the patient artist trained in de- 
tail, — in just that elaboration that a limited surface 
requires. What has been described, in his early 
work, as a taste for theatrical action, the set scene, 
which he derived from Scott, remained with him 
throughout. A writer with such a discipline and 
taste, developed and fixed by long practise in the 
short story, naturally falls into an agglomerative 
method of construction, when he attempts a greater 
task. The virtues of his school, however, remain 
with him. Hawthorne's hand lost none of its cun- 
ning, in the passage from the tale to the romance. 
He owns the same brilliant effects of gloom and sun- 
shine, of mystery, fantasy and myth, but now they 
are massed. This is the characteristic difference 
between his earlier and later manhood, with the 
addition in his full maturity of a greater depth in 
meditation and a fuJJer illusion in his visionary 
power. 

It is this illusion, the last triumph of imagination, 
which most characterizes and crowns Hawthorne's 
genius. It is the air that is the breath of ideal crea- 
tions and spreads over the landscape of all works of 



CONCLUSION 235 

imaginative genius with a scenic effect, as in a pic- 
ture or a theater, that mocks reahty, so more es- 
sentially real does it seem than fact. Poetic illusion 
is its climax; Shakespearean illusion is its dramatic 
form; but it always emanates from the ideal and 
fills its world. Hawthorne's works are full of it; 
and this is best indicated by the emphasis which has 
been constantly placed here on the artistic quality in 
his genius. This is what gives him his charm, as his 
moral quality gives him his substance. At the end 
these three traits stand out, characterizing him : he 
was a New Englander, representative of the land 
and the historic people; he was an artist, who filled 
his somewhat abstract world with a magic of real- 
ity, while he wrought with exquisite detail m ideal 
elements; he was a moralist who made his art the 
vehicle of thought upon the profoundest mysteries 
of human fate. In the first phase he is dear to his 
own people; but it is by the last two that he makes a 
universal appeal. 



THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Alice Pyncheon, story of: shows imaginative tension, 103; a 
sub-plot in House of Seven Gables, 231. 

American Note-books, see Note-books. 

Artist of the Beautiful: fusion of the physical image with men- 
tal idea without intervention of human person, 78-79; 
extract, 79-89; marvelous mechanical toy illustrates au- 
thor's interest in the fine arts, 105; comparison with 
Scarlet Letter, 143. 

Birthmark: physical union of image with person involved, as 
well as fusion of the physical image with mental idea, 
78; comparison with Scarlet Letter, 143. 

Blithedale Romance : contemporaneity of, 20, 32, 42, 65 ; Eliot's 
pulpit, symboHzes nature, 22; extract from, 22-31; dis- 
plays Hawthorne practically untouched by moral feel- 
ings of his time, 91-93. 

Boston : 'Trog Pond" on Boston Common, 16-17 ; "Parker's," 
17-20; Boston Custom House, "darksome dungeon," 63; 
Province House, 63 ; Boston Athenaeum visits, 105 ; 
compared in respect to literary status with Edinburgh, 
222. 

Brook Farm : connection with Blithedale Romance, 21, 91 ; 
Hawthorne's discontentment with practical life there, 62. 

Browning formula, compared with Hawthorne's interest in 
the soul, 95. 

Channing, Ellery, Hawthorne's intimacy with, 134. 

Childe Harold, descriptions compared with those of Marble 

Faun, 217. 
Chillingworth, Roger, 167, 215. 
Clifford, 98, 120, 124, 125, 129. 
Coleridge, S. T., fantasy of, 171. 
Concord, Mecca of New England intellect, 137. 
Corinne, descriptions compared with Marble Faun, 217. 

Dimmesdalc, Arthur, 215. 

Donatello, 16, 193, 212, 213, 215, 229, 230, 231. 

Browne's Wooden Image, 69-70; 105. 

Edwards, Jonathan: moral heredity distilled, 2)6; intellectual 
subtlety. 107. 

Emerson, R. W. : Snow Storm and Snow-Flakes, 1 ; at Con- 
cord, 13; compared with Hawthorne, 33, 137; intellec- 
tual subtlety, 107. 

239 



240 INDEX 



Endicott and the Red Cross, 66. 

Footprints on the Seashore, extracts, 50-52, 52-55. 

Fourierism, 91. 

Fuller, Margaret, at Concord, 13. 

Goodman, Brown, 68. 

Gray Champion: 66, 72; compared with Artist of the Beautiful, 

89. 
Gray's Elegy, graveyard mood, 61. 

Haunted Mind: 56; extract. 56-60. 

Hawthorne, N. : artistic instinct, 63-65, 90-91, 104-106, 136, 179, 
192-4 ; contemporaneity, 1-3, 3-5, 20-33, 34. 42-43, 60-66, 
91, 93, 99, 103, 117-120, 132-134, 140-141, 177-8, 121-122; 
economy of his art, 100-103. 139, 182 ; imagination, 67-71, 
90-99, 169, 171-174, 195, 208, 229, 234; moraHst. 36-37, 
41-42, 55-56, 76, 89-90, 94-95. 106-108, 137-139, 176. 181, 
205, 209-10. 218, 228; observer, 6-20, 40, 43-45, 46, 98, 
169, 224-225 ; style, 223 ; success greater with female than 
male characters, 215 ; use of phvsical image, 74-76, 77-79, 
90-91, 141-144, 145, 147, 150-151,'l57-159, 165-168, 184-185. 

Hepaihah, 107, 117, 120, 124, 125, 129. 

Hilda, 212, 214. 

Hollingsworth, 21. 

House of Seven Gables: local flavor of, 42, 98, 226, 229; New 
England tradition given imaginative form in, 96; story 
of a family, 97-99; note-book, the seed-plot, for scene of 
the hens, and character of Uncle Vernier, 99; the tale 
is threefold, story of old Maide, story of Alice, story of 
Clifford and his group, 99-100; greater kinship between 
Hawthorne and this story than any other of his books, 
103-104; use of the "portrait," 105; Puritan idea of 
inexorable penalty of sin in inherited curse, 107-109; 
extracts from, 109-117, 120-124, 125-129, 130-132; com- 
parison with Marble Faun, 180; climax of story, 230. 

Irving, Washington : compared as early American tourist, with 
Hawthorne, 43, 179; style compared, 61. 

Judd, Sylvester, novel "Margaret," 38. 

Kenyan, 181, 184, 212, 215. 

Lady Eleanor's Mantle, relation of physical image and mental 
idea. 77. 

Longfellow, H. W. : "My Lost Youth," stanza from, 3 ; belle- 
lettrist, ZZ', "long thoughts," 35; cosmopolite compared 
with Hawthorne, 43; treatment of local tradition, 93, 137. 



INDEX 241 

Lowell, J. R. : cosmopolite compared with Hawthorne, 43 ; con- 
temporaneity of, 175. 

Macbeth: "air-drawn dagger" and flaming letter "A" in the 
sky, 165 ; knocking at the gate and "far off noise of sing- 
ing and laughter," in Marble Faun, 194. 

Marble Faun: characters of. 180-181; extracts from, 186-192, 
195-204, 205-208; local New England feeling in the 
moral meaning of. 226; imaginative quahty of, 229; 
climax of, 230; sub-plot in plan for escape, 231; sym- 
bolism in, 233. 

Midsummer Night's Dream, general life of Theseus' court 
touched as lightly as communal life of New England in 
Scarlet Letter, 140. 

Ministers Veil, physical image and mental idea, 75. 

Miriam, 193, 212, 213, 214, 215. 

Note-books: American, extracts, August 10, 1842, 9-12; Oc- 
tober 9, 1841, 15-16; May 7, 1850, 17-20; English, ex- 
tract, September 8, 1855, 16-17. 

Old Esther Dudley, 67. 
Old Manse, 13. 
Old Moodie, 99. 

Pearl, 147, 148. 150. 151. 158. 172, 174. 

Pha:be, 119, 125, 129, 132. 

Poe, E. A. : master of fantasy, 173 ; ingenuity of construction 

and development of theme, l73. 
Priscilla, 2\, 214. ^ ^^^ 

Prynnc, Hester, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 151, 157, 1^8, 170, 

174, 193. 

Rappacini's Daughter, blend of physical image with person and 
fusion with mental idea, 78, 143. 

Salem: worthies of Salem Custom House, 5; birthplace, 7; 
early local sketches, 7; chamber at, 32, 43, 62; Salem 
Custom House. 63. 92 ; gabled house in old Salem, 101, 
103; Salem interest in "Flaxman's Designs." 108; pro- 
vincial life of Salem in House of Seven Gables, 117-120; 
"old Salem," Hawthorne's connection with it, 133-135. 

Scarlet Letter: local flavor of, 42, lj9-140, 175. 177, 178; first 
concept of, 138; letter "A," climax of Hawthorne's use 
of phvsical image to express mental idea, 141-144, 147- 
148, 150-151, 157-158, 165-167; extracts, 144-145, 145-147, 
148-150, 151-157, 159-165, 168-169, 170; fantasy in, 171- 
175. 



242 INDEX 



Scott, Walter Sir : Scott's Presbyterians, 60 ; influence on Haw 
thorne, 62, 66, 98, 234; Scott's "saving common-sense,' 
135; historical novel, 227. 

Shakesperean illusion, 235. 

Sights from a Steeple, extracts, 45, 99. 

Snow-Flakes, 1-2. 

Sweet Alice Vane, 67. 



1 



Tales of the Province House, 67. 

Tanglczvood Tales, 71. 

Taylor, Bayard, early American tourist, 179. 

Thanatopsis, graveyard mood of, 61. 

Thoreau, H. : at Concord, 13 ; compared with Hawthorne, 

ZZ, 43. 
Tollgatherer's Day, extract, 46-49. 

Uncle Parker, 4. 
Uncle Venner, 99, 120. 

Very, Jones, poet of Salem, 38. 
Village Uncle, extracts, 3-4, 4-6. 

Westervelt, 21. 

Whittier, J. G. : "Snow-Bound," 1 ; compared with Hawthorne, 

43; scribe of local tradition, 93. 
Wives of the Dead, 69. 

Zenobia, 21, 214. 



31^77 -2X 



